Proper names: does grammatical gender imply natural gender?

Question

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!

Answer 1

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).

Answer 2

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."

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.