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In french, there are many female given names that are derived from male given names. Those names are often obtained by adding "ine", "ette", "e" or "a" at the end of the male name. Examples include

  • Bérnard -> Bérnadette
  • Claude -> Claudine, Claudette
  • Charles -> Charline, Charlotte
  • Paul -> Pauline, Paulette
  • Gérald -> Géraldine
  • Martin -> Martine
  • Jean -> Jeanne
  • Aléxandre -> Aléxandra
  • Patrick -> Patricia

I might be mistaken in assuming that the male name came first for some of the above exampless. Consider also

  • Sylvain -> Sylvie, Sylvaine, Sylvette.

Here, Sylvain is not the "ancestor" of the female counterparts but all descend from Silvanus who is a male name.

While it appears easy to find female names that derive from male names, I could not find any example of a male name that derived from a female name. In romance languages, are there examples of male given names that derive from female given names?

Sir Cornflakes
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Remi.b
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    Not an answer: The Italian man's name 'Andrea' sounds particularly feminine in English, because 'Andrea' in English is a female name. The Italian name comes from the Greek man's name 'Andreas'. – Mitch Aug 01 '18 at 18:46
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    Maybe a silly remark, but how do you know whether Françoise is derived from François by adding an e, or François is derived from Françoise by removing an e? All right, the name will probably come from older names, like Latin Franciscus or Francisca, or something, but ultimately it is a common adjective turned into a proper name. And the adjective has "always" had two parallel forms, corresponding to grammatical genders that have existed longer than the notion of being French. – Jeppe Stig Nielsen Aug 01 '18 at 21:41
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    @JeppeStigNielsen. Basically you are correct. François(e) is simply the older spelling of français(e), the adjective from Francia “the land inhabited by the Franks”, which (like the modern “France”) is feminine. – fdb Aug 02 '18 at 10:48
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    Oh... good finding. My assumption was wrong here. I'm removing François -> Françoise from my list. You can post Françoise -> François as an answer. – Remi.b Aug 02 '18 at 14:51
  • Can you clarify what you mean by "in romance languages"? Are you are looking only for names that are currently used in romance naming traditions, regardless of origin? – 1006a Aug 02 '18 at 16:46
  • @1006a This is a really good point that I failed to make clear from the beginning. I would have ideally looked for a name switch that have happened in a romance language as recently as possible. Most answers don't focus on that but it is only by my failure to clarify my interest (and it is now too late to edit my post). – Remi.b Aug 02 '18 at 16:51
  • I wrote an answer that had a different take on what you meant than the apparent interpretation here; I've deleted it, but the bit that might be of interest to you: there's a lot of creative naming in the world right now, including various ways to name boys after women, so I would look at modern coinages and possibly surnames-as-names to find recent masculinizations of traditionally feminine names. – 1006a Aug 02 '18 at 17:02
  • @Mitch interesting; in Brazilian Portuguese Andréa is in fact a feminine name (the masculine being André). – melissa_boiko Aug 03 '18 at 10:54
  • @JeppeStigNielsen talking about romanic grammatical gender is opening a whole other can of worms, because masculine adjectives are guaranteed to be the "default" forms: they're always the main dictionary forms, and they always prevail when modifying a group of undetermined or mixed gender entities (e.g a group of 1000 women and 1 man). In other words, there's no way "Francoise" derives from "Francois". – Vun-Hugh Vaw Feb 28 '19 at 16:19

5 Answers5

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The first thing I thought of was names derived in antiquity from the names of ancient Greek goddesses.

For example, the French male name Hercule is ultimately from the name of the Greek goddess Hera (Ἥρα) (it's not just a masculinized form of the name, though, obviously).

The name Artemio seems to be used in Italian and Spanish; I believe it comes from the Latin form Artemius of the Greek male name Αρτέμιος, which seems to be based on the name of the goddess Artemis (Ἄρτεμις).

In a comment, A. M. Bittlingmayer pointed out that Demetrius is similarly derived from the name of the Greek goddess Demeter. Demetrio seems to be used as an Italian form of this name.

I can't think of any recent examples, or productive processes for deriving male names from female names.

brass tacks
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    Analogous to Artemios is Demetrius. Marius was pre-Christian but then later associated with Mariam. Maybe Genovevo is similar, or maybe it was first from Genoveva. There are men named and José María, and for a recent example, Guadalupe, not sure if that counts as a productive process, even though it was a bit predictable. – Adam Bittlingmayer Aug 01 '18 at 08:13
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    I would have thought Hercule came from Herakles/Hercules. – JAB Aug 01 '18 at 22:25
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    @JAB The Greek Heracles means "Glory/Pride of Hera" according to Wikipedia. – Andrew Aug 01 '18 at 22:51
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    @AndrewPiliser: Strange, given that he was the result of Zeus's adultery with a human woman, not a child of Hera, and Hera hated him and tried to kill/defame him repeatedly. I guess the name refers to how Hera's attempts to destroy him (specifically, driving him mad so he murdered his family and had to atone) led to glory in his Labors? – ShadowRanger Aug 01 '18 at 23:26
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In Italian there are a number of historically female names which are occasionally used as male names, e.g.

  • Celeste, Amabile, Fiore, Diamante

In many Romance languages the female name Maria (or some variant thereof) has historically been used in male names, either standalone or as part of a compound name, though this practice has generally declined with time:

Language Male name
Spanish José María1
Portuguese José Maria
Medieval French Marie
French Jean-Marie, Marie-Jean, Marie-Pierre etc
Italian Antonio Maria (middle name) etc

The female names Guadalupe and Inés are also sometimes given as a second name to males in Spanish e.g. José Guadalupe, José Inés Palafox Núñez.

1. Often abbreviated to José Mari, see: José María Romero Poyón, José María Martín Bejarano-Serrano, José Mari García, José Mari Bakero

iacobo
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5

There are a few examples from Germanic names: Deolindo or Teolindo are derived from Deolinda/Teolinda (modern German cognate: Dietlind).

Sir Cornflakes
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    The Biblical Petros is a translation of the Aramaic name kēphā, which is masculine in Aramaic. The female name Petra derives from Petros, not from Greek πέτρα. – fdb Aug 01 '18 at 10:27
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    πέτρος and πέτρα are both attested from Homer onwards. You cannot say that one is more “original” than the other. – fdb Aug 01 '18 at 10:36
  • @ukemi. I think he is talking about Italian names of Germanic origin. – fdb Aug 01 '18 at 11:38
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    Re petra ==> Petros, I read the question as excluding those derived from common nouns not from a female noun, there would be many. – Adam Bittlingmayer Aug 01 '18 at 13:08
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Derivation and inflection are different processes. Several proper nouns in Romance languages inflect for gender; in French, such inflection may be easily mistaken for a derivation, because the masculine gender usually takes a 0-desinence, while the feminine form takes an -e: Jean - Jeanne, Dominic - Dominique. But in other Romance languages, the difference is clearer: Paolo - Paola, Carlos - Carla, Alonzo - Alonza.

That said, there is a common trend (more intense in French than in the other languages) to derive feminine proper names from masculine ones, often as diminutives (Charles - Charlotte, Carlos - Carlota) or generic adjective-forming suffixes (Giuseppe - Giuseppina), or even random feminine-looking endings (Carlos - Carlene, probably by analogy with Marlene).

The reverse is much rarer. In Portuguese, I would point to "Mariano", which while etymologically related to Marianus (and consequently Marius), is usually interpreted as as "related or belonging to Maria" (and in several cases, such as emancipated slaves, orphans, or illegitimate boys, may have been actually intended as that). Another example could be several Brazilian Portuguese names ending in "ildo", which are etymologically related to germanic (and feminine) "Hilde": Hildo, Arildo, Brunildo, Leovigildo (sometimes already as fancy constructions such as Josenildo, Marildo, or Jacildo).

Luís Henrique
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French Toussaint "All Saints' Day" is feminine, but as a personal name it is masculine.

fdb
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    It isn't "derived from a female name" though. Maybe you meant to make this a comment? – Adam Bittlingmayer Aug 01 '18 at 13:12
  • @A.M.Bittlingmayer. Names of holidays are proper nouns, and thus written with a capital. – fdb Aug 01 '18 at 13:22
  • @fdb So in french, words with a capital are derived from female names? That information is missing to make the connection here. – R. Schmitz Aug 01 '18 at 15:36
  • @R.Schmitz. No, I said that proper names are written with a capital, as they are in English. – fdb Aug 01 '18 at 16:47
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    @fdb Well, I did understand what you said literally, but not how it was supposed to answer Bittligmayers comment, which mentioned that your answer is not about a male name derived from a female name (what the question is about). – R. Schmitz Aug 01 '18 at 17:22
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    It’s a male name derived from a feminine proper noun (La Toussaint) – Frédéric Grosshans Aug 05 '18 at 15:12
  • The question starts out with "there are many female given names that are derived from male given names". I think it's clear that the what's desired is personal names deriving from other personal names. – LjL Feb 28 '19 at 19:21