It's interesting how it shakes out historically, like one of the most popular Slavic names is "Dmitri", derived from "Demetrius", which is the Romans making a masculine name out of the name of the extremely female Greek goddess Demeter
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
Yup. See also “Gaius” from “Gaia”.
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Replying to @bazzalisk @BootlegGirl
On the flip side you have weirdness like "Meredith" becoming a woman's name for some reason, even though etymologically it's extremely masculine ("Sea-Lord") and it doesn't look like a girly name on the face of it Probably just due to similarity to "Mary"
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Obviously the reality is that linguistic gender is just bullshit, like all you need is one hot girl who gets famous with the given name "Spencer" and suddenly "Spencer" is a feminine name now
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
Um … that’s not linguistic gender. Linguistic gender is a feature of some languages where nouns (and occasionally verbs) come in categories that decline in different ways. It has nothing to do with maleness and femaleness and only historical accident has associated them.
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Replying to @bazzalisk @BootlegGirl
Meh, I'm speaking sloppily but I think the principle applies The idea of grammatical gender is vestigial in English but it's where we get our sense that names that end in "-a" or "-en" or "-ie" are feminine and names that end in "-o" or "-er" or "-an" are masculine
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I mean that's why we play these weird etymologically dubious games with trying to generate new names by altering the spelling of old ones "Ashley" hung in there a long time as a boys' name with "Ashlee" and "Ashleigh" and so forth being the girls' variants
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People insisting on "Tony" vs "Toni" and "Danny" vs "Dani" and so on
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
Kind of yes, kind of no. It’s interesting how firmly tied grammatical and human gender have become in European language cultures, when it’s something of an accident of history based on the importance of latin.
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Latin happened to have the words for man and woman in different genders. Most other Indo European languages didn’t have that. The Romans started calling those two genders masculine and feminine as short-hands, and Latin was so influential that other languages started doing it too
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I... don't know that that's true Masculine and feminine nouns and endings are definitely a thing in Sanskrit, and by extension modern Hindi
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Which definitely predates and is separate from Latin influence Same with Greek and Hebrew, I'm pretty sure
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
Looks like you’re right and I’m wrong there.
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