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Questions about grammatical gender abound on this forum and on other linguistics forums. It's well known that in general, grammatical gender need not coincide with natural gender.

However, I am interested in whether there exist languages in which the grammatical gender of a given name appears not to coincide with the natural gender to which that name is generally assigned.

I will exclude ambigeneric names and names belonging to non-human/neuter noun classes. The question is whether, in any languages you know of, a given name of feminine grammatical gender is used as a masculine given name, or vice versa.

EDIT: I know of one case where this apparent constraint was strong enough that a Japanese female name ending in -o became a Latin first declension noun ending in -a, to avoid a conflict between grammatical and natural gender -- when Princess Michiko of the Chrysanthemum Throne visited Salamanca University!

jogloran
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    "Gender" isn't always gender-based. Grammatical genders can be divided based on all sorts of things- size, shape, material, animacy... – Adele- Nexus of Potlucks May 15 '12 at 15:28
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    Even considering Japanese has no gender, female names usually end in -o. – Alenanno May 15 '12 at 16:08
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    @Alenanno: In particular, many female Japanese names end in 子 (ko "child"). A number of others end in -a (Rika, Reika) and some in -i (Yuki, Yuri, Aki, Megumi). Anyway, I'm not sure the final vowel is significant, but there are a number of final characters (子, 香, 華, 美) which are popular in female names. – jogloran May 15 '12 at 22:45
  • @AdeleC I realise that grammatical gender (or noun class, more generally) does not necessarily coincide with the classes masculine and feminine. I will restrict consideration to languages which do have noun classes traditionally called masculine and feminine. – jogloran May 15 '12 at 22:51
  • @jogloran Yeah, usually they're related to "beautiful" or "delicate" things, right? – Alenanno May 15 '12 at 22:52
  • That's right. The ones I mentioned before -- 子, 香, 華, 美 -- are respectively 'child', 'fragrant', 'flowery' and 'beautiful'. Others like 恵 (Megumi) are just the nominalisations of verbs (in this case 'blessing'), which in Japanese end in -i. – jogloran May 15 '12 at 23:33
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    My first thought was: names have grammatical gender separate from the gender of the bearer? They don't in my L1. A girl with a masculine name would still be a she and the adjectives would be in their feminine form. – kaleissin May 16 '12 at 07:08
  • And "Michika" for "Michiko" is actually unnecessary, as female names in -o were not unknown to the Romans (e.g. Callisto, Gorgo, Alecto...). But for one example that actually answers your question, the Latin word cupido "desire" is feminine but as a proper name Cupido refers to a male deity (Cupid in English). It does become masculine when used this way (though the form and declension do not change). – Muke Tever May 16 '12 at 12:06
  • @MukeTever: Very interesting. While I can only upvote a comment, that's basically the very kind of answer I was after from this question (although different standards may apply to the gods...) By the way, I think I remember you from the conlang list, which I was a subscriber of over a decade ago... – jogloran May 16 '12 at 12:10
  • @jogloran I might expand it into an answer as more examples occur to me. I was indeed on conlang back in the day, though had to leave it due to the high traffic in relation to time constraints. – Muke Tever May 16 '12 at 12:18
  • In many historically Christian (especially Catholic) nations "Mary" or equivalent is sometimes used as a male name. Notable examples are Spanish María and Polish Marija/Maria. Usually, though, this is as a middle or secondary name and not as a primary given name. – Mark Beadles May 16 '12 at 17:47

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I do know of at least one example in Latin where a feminine noun is given as a name to a male, namely cupido, a normally feminine noun meaning "desire", but given to the male deity Cupido (Cupid in English).

You restrict your question to given names, though I think family names might be more likely to exist with a mismatch between grammatical and natural gender. In Spanish, for example, family names do not have to be words of the same gender as the referent, i.e., a woman can have the surname Delgado (delgado, a masculine word meaning "skinny, slender") and a man can have the surname Vega (vega, a feminine word meaning "meadow"). The same thing of course happens in English (a woman can be called Johnson even though son is masculine), but compare Russian and other Slavic languages, where surnames usually change form depending on whether they are given to a male or a female; a man's surname can be Толстой (Tolstoj, from толстый = "stout") but his wife or daughter will have the feminine form Толстая (Tolstaja).

Muke Tever
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  • Interestingly, the Pocket Langenscheidt has under cupīdō the annotation f (m). I wonder if the influence of being associated with a male deity flowed back to the original abstract noun... – jogloran May 16 '12 at 13:16
  • @jogloran Added a link to Lewis & Short's entry. They mention a few places that it appears as masc. and also give the note "personified in all authors"(!) Possibly masculine attestations of the word are more likely to refer to the concept as personified? – Muke Tever May 16 '12 at 13:23
  • Very interesting. This is why I love this site! – jogloran May 16 '12 at 13:34
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    @MukeTever: My guess would be that it was normally m. when personified, f. otherwise. That is because I cannot imagine cupido to be personified in Latin other than as a boy; if desire needed a feminine personification, Venus was chosen. – Cerberus May 09 '13 at 06:42
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I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean by "a given name of feminine grammatical gender used as a masculine given name."

Gender assignment in given names is usually lexical, i.e. the Russian boy's name Petja is M and not F - although nouns ending in -a are usually F in IE languages - precisely because that particular name is given to boys, and not girls.

UPDATE: A couple of words on gender in linguistics. Gender in linguistics doesn't mean biological gender - linguistics is not biology, after all. It is understood as a type, kind.

For animate nouns (NB: animate doesn't mean alive), gender assignment is usually based on semantics. In other words, if a word denotes a male (human being), the word is masculine.

For inanimate nouns, gender assignment is based on their morphosyntactic properties, e.g. all nouns taking a particular set of endings belong to gender X. That is why the first declension in Latin includes feminine (mostly) and masculine nouns, both common and proper (for a list of some masculine nouns belonging to the first declension see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_masculine_Latin_nouns_of_the_1st_declension).

Now, let me repeat it here. If a proper noun denotes a male, it is of the masculine gender. It doesn't matter whether it belongs to the first declension or not. It will be masculine. That is why "Catilina" in Latin is masculine, although it belongs to the first declension. Or in Russian, "Petja" (Pete) and "Vera" (a girl's name) belong to the same type of declension.

To make things even more complicated, gender is only one type of noun categorization (see more on noun classes). There are languages where there is no masculine/feminine distinction in nouns.

see a famous passage written by Mark Twain: "the reader will see that in Germany a man may think he is a man, but when he comes to look into the matter closely, he is bound to have his doubts; he finds that in sober truth he is a most ridiculous mixture; and if he ends by trying to comfort himself with the thought that he can at least depend on a third of this mess as being manly and masculine, the humiliating second thought will quickly remind him that in this respect he is no better off than any woman or cow in the land.

In the German it is true that by some oversight of the inventor of the language, a Woman is a female; but a Wife (Weib) is not -- which is unfortunate. A Wife, here, has no sex; she is neuter; so, according to the grammar, a fish is he, his scales are she, but a fishwife is neither. To describe a wife as sexless may be called under-description; that is bad enough, but over-description is surely worse."

Alex B.
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    Thanks for the response. I'm not interested in the fact that Petja ends in -a, and -a is feminine in a number of IE languages. The sound value isn't relevant. I was wondering if any language which has noun classes traditionally designated masculine and feminine have proper names whose natural gender assignment goes against grammatical gender assignment. – jogloran May 15 '12 at 22:45
  • Well, (grammatical) gender assignment is based on what you called "sound value" - in fact, morphology (the ending "a" in this case). It's called grammatical because the majority of nouns of type A (ending in -a here) are assigned a particular grammatical gender (feminine). – Alex B. May 15 '12 at 23:15
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    You've stated a principle which is certainly true in several IE languages, but there are a lot more languages than those... – jogloran May 15 '12 at 23:32
  • Just curious, how do you understand (grammatical) gender assignment? – Alex B. May 16 '12 at 00:09
  • Gender assignment is just a special case of noun class assignment, where the noun class happens to correspond often (but not always) to natural gender. The question is whether a paradigm whose members are largely of feminine natural gender, for example, is unlikely to be used as the paradigm for a masculine given name, and whether you know of any examples of this. In other words, in a given language, is a stereotypically feminine declension (like the first in Latin) seen as an inappropriate source of male given names? – jogloran May 16 '12 at 00:50
  • So you're saying that feminine nouns of declinatio prima in Latin are "feminine" because concepts they represent are "largely of feminine natural gender?" – Alex B. May 16 '12 at 02:44
  • No, I'm saying that the first declension is stereotypically feminine both in the sense that the vast majority of its nouns are of feminine grammatical gender, and that the proper names which belong to it are (to my knowledge all) of feminine natural gender... Returning again to the original question, this is not necessarily a cross-linguistic fact, and I was wondering if anyone knew any counter-examples. – jogloran May 16 '12 at 02:51
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    Now you're making more sense. FYI, there are masculine nouns that belong to the first declension in Latin. Is that what you want? As a side note, I'd recommend reading Corbett's book on gender. – Alex B. May 16 '12 at 03:59
  • I'm perfectly aware that there are first declension masculine nouns, like nauta or agricola. The question is about given names, and I'm intrigued by what you mean when you say "gender assignment in given names always goes against grammatical gender". Do you mean that natural gender assignment is always opposite to grammatical gender? That's surely not true either... – jogloran May 16 '12 at 04:04
  • @jogloran, "gender assignment in given names always goes against grammatical gender". What it means is that with given names gender assignment is based on semantics, not morphosyntax. – Alex B. Jul 23 '12 at 21:58
  • @AlexB.: I have never heard of any true exception either, but grammatical and natural sex don't coincide by definition for proper names, so perhaps there is a language where a certain name used for men leads to using the pronoun that is normally reserved for women? It seems unlikely, but it is not by definition impossible; if a girl is it in German, why not John in some African language? There are countless examples for common nouns that have been turned into proper nouns, although that's probably not what the OP intended. The same applies to irony. – Cerberus May 09 '13 at 07:12
  • @Cerberus, for what it's worth: I asked my German students about "das Maedchen," and they said that in most cases they'd refer to this noun as "sie," not "es." – Alex B. May 09 '13 at 23:59
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    @AlexB.: I believe that's a bit modern, possibly informal, especially when it is very close to Mädchen. At any rate, I'm sure your students wouldn't say die Mädchen: ask them! If Mädchen has any grammatical sex at all, it has to be neuter, because articles should trump other considerations. What your students described I would rather see as a switch of reference in mid-sentence, from "Mädchen" to the actual person (just as you can't say *the community are friendly, while you can say Welcome to Firton! In this community, you will be treated well; they are close-knit but friendly). – Cerberus May 10 '13 at 01:13
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    It is interesting that Petja uses feminine declension in Russian, but that is a local specific. In Czech, for example, it is declined as a masculine word (dat. Péťovi). -a is a common ending in masculine words, the předseda (= president) paradigm. Similarly when the Italian name Andrea is used in Czech, dat. Andreovi. The ending is not only a masculine one and feminine version of those words often require a different ending (předsedkyně for a female person, předseda is clearly male). – Vladimir F Героям слава Dec 21 '22 at 06:20
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    @jogloran For a first declension masculine proper name, consider Agrippa. – Sir Cornflakes Dec 23 '22 at 19:12
  • @Cerberus And in some parts where German is spoken, all women are grammatically neuter, the area stretches from Western Switzerland over Alsatia and Saarland to river Mosel, turning suddenly east and goind up to the Thuringian border: https://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/artikelform/ – Sir Cornflakes Dec 23 '22 at 20:30
  • @SirCornflakes: Wow, so odd! – Cerberus Dec 24 '22 at 00:30
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A popular example in German (at least) is "Maria". E.g., Karl Maria Brandauer.

To be honest, "Maria" is also the only example that really comes to mind for me, and I am very sure that this is a special case based on religious roots - for sure nobody would ever have called Mr. Brandauer "Maria" to his face, at no stage of his life.

AnoE
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I don't know examples from personal names in German (there is a general rule in German naming laws that ordinary words are unsuitable as given names) but with titles like Exzellenz "excellence", Hoheit or Majestät both "majesty" that are grammatically feminine but applied to male persons, like in the old-fashioned address Seine königliche Hoheit Philipp II. "His Royal Majesty Philipp II." (This style of address can be heard on German carnival sessions when Prince Carneval is introduced.).

P.S. See also Languages with masculine nouns for various female entities, or feminine nouns for male entities and the answers there.

Sir Cornflakes
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