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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

Ends in 'a' = female: a relatively safe assumption, as far as an assumption here can be safe, with no other context. A strong majority in many places will match that. Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling, which can go either way (may follow that culture's patterns, may not, highly varied).

Ends in vowel (sound) = female: probably mostly true, in that I strongly suspect it's >50%, but it's unreliable enough that I'd avoid trying to base any assumptions off it.

Names really follow no rules at all here. For both good and bad. E.g. most recently I ran across a "La-sia" pronounced "ladashsia". If it's spelled vat-ik'Nff and pronounced "King George" and they're female, then that's what's correct.

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I mostly agree, but for example Andrea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea is a masculine name in Italian and a feminine name in Spanish. Here in Argentina it's mostly feminine, but if someone has many Italian ancestors, it may be masculine.

> It is part of the Italian male names ending in a, some others being Elia (Elias), Enea (Aeneas), Luca (Lucas), Mattia (Matthias), Nicola (Nicholas), Tobia (Tobias).

Edit: "Here in Argentina it's mostly masculine" -> "feminine"

The masculine/feminine question of the name Andrea is made weirder by the fact it literally derives from the Greek word for ‘adult male’ (andros)

More likely it is not derived directly from "andros", but from the feminine noun "andreia", which means courage or virility.

So the original grammatical gender was feminine, hence the -a termination.

> Ends in 'a' = female: a relatively safe assumption, as far as an assumption here can be safe, with no other context. A strong majority in many places will match that.

Which places? I guess I ask because your next sentence:

> Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling

Which makes me wonder if you meant "US places", because I can think of a few male names, which maybe categorised as "foreign" if you're in the US, that end in "a".

e.g. Csaba (pronounced "Chubba") is a reasonably common Hungarian name.

And some not so "foreign" ones, albeit mostly with Biblical roots, like Joshua and Ezra.

The names with Biblical roots did not end in -a in their original form, but in most cases their termination was "-ah". The final consonant was usually dropped in English, resulting in the "-a" termination.

Given this is a thread on a post about US names, in reply to a foreigner remarking on the difficulty of names in the US:

Yes, I was referring to places in the USA.

Indo european languages mostly, probably

> Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling, which can go either way

Or the names of biblical prophets like Ezra or Elisha. Not very popular today but you can find a lot of them in 19th century records.

Those names were longer in their original form, so none of them ended in "-a", but in English one or more letters were dropped, resulting in the "-a" termination.

E.g. Ezra was Esdras in Greek and in Hebrew it probably ended in "-ahu", while Elisha was Eliseus in Greek and in Hebrew it ended in ayin after the "-a-".

I've actually run across more female "Ezra"s than male, but broadly yes agreed.

See https://www.reddit.com r/tragedies for all sorts of, uhh, inventive spellings and names.

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