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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Replying to @bazzalisk @arthur_affect
Hence Japanese names not mapping to this schema at all
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Replying to @BootlegGirl @bazzalisk
Japan does not have grammatical gender in this sense, it's one of the features that's mostly (but not completely) associated with descent from proto-Indo-European
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Which is very different from saying Japan doesn't have the *social* concept of gender, which it absolutely obviously does But that's why stuff isn't a one-to-one mapping to get languages
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Like Japanese doesn't have the equivalent of "he vs she", all pronouns are gender neutral (except recent ones invented specifically to translate "he/she" from Western texts) The "gendered first-person pronouns" people like to talk about are technically registers of politeness
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So it's a second-order thing, "watashi" is a "feminine" word for "I" because it's *polite*, and women are expected to be polite to a greater degree than men A man calling himself "watashi" isn't acting girly so much as he is acting formal and deferential
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