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25 votes
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In romance languages, are there examples of male names that derive from female names?

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 (...
brass tacks's user avatar
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16 votes

Why do some languages lack family name markers?

The use of grammaticalized family-name markers as in the Slavic etc. cases is relatively infrequent, so the better question is, why or how do such constructions arise in some languages? The ordinary ...
user6726's user avatar
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13 votes

Is the study of proper names really a branch of linguistics?

Proper names are nouns, albeit with specific characteristics, so they play the roles other nouns play in syntax (subject, object, etc). They also partake in morphology; if a language has genders, it ...
Luís Henrique's user avatar
12 votes

In romance languages, are there examples of male names that derive from female names?

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 ...
iacobo's user avatar
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12 votes

Excepting Romanian, is "Wales" ever translated/transliterated in modern languages with the same term as that meaning "Gaul" or "Gauls"?

This may sound weird, but it's not. Well, in fact, it is very weird indeed. –– With equal right one might say that Romania should correctly be called Wales. –– If that joke is lost on you, read the ...
LаngLаngС's user avatar
12 votes

Why do some languages lack family name markers?

First of all, family names are far from being universal. In many places of the world they are pretty recent introductions. The existence of family names is also not determined by linguistic factors (...
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
10 votes

Why are the phonemes of Tutankhamun's throne name transliterated out of order?

The throne name (praenomen) has the following four hieroglyphs, listed by Gardiner number as: 𓎟 V30 (basket) 𓏥 Z2 (three strokes) 𓆣 L1 (dung beetle) 𓇳 N5 (sun) I think the issue ...
Michaelyus's user avatar
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9 votes

Why is it that Babylonian king names do not match their Akkadian equivalent?

This comes down to the ambiguities in the Cuneiform script. Cuneiform doesn't have a one-to-one correspondence between signs and sounds. The sign DIŊIR is a good example. The sign started out in ...
Draconis's user avatar
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9 votes

Julius Caesar original name spelling?

As others stated, on monumental inscriptions, the name of Julius Caesar would look similar to IVLIVS CAESAR However, saying it was "spelled with an I instead of a J" may be misleading, because 'J' ...
LjL's user avatar
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9 votes
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How do Indian short form of names work in the USA?

Long Indian names are indeed shortened for informal/semi formal usage in India too. It is typically shortened to the first two syllables. For example Venkataraghavan usually becomes Venkat and in the ...
khal's user avatar
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6 votes
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Do Azeri people actually use Ə instead of A in names?

This is an interesting question. As always with transliteration, there are compromises. Why do Azeris still transcribe their names if both the forms are written in Latin? I am aware that they used ...
Adam Bittlingmayer's user avatar
6 votes
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Why do some languages have many names?

The names for a given language can be divided into exonyms and endonyms. Exonyms are the names given to the language (sometimes by extension, from the name given to the people who speak it) by ...
pablodf76's user avatar
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6 votes

Frequency of non-legal name preference

This is an area where meaningful scientific research is impossible. The main problem lies in the concept of "legal name". There are hundreds of countries with their own laws, which may range ...
user6726's user avatar
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5 votes

In romance languages, are there examples of male names that derive from female names?

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 ...
Luís Henrique's user avatar
5 votes

In romance languages, are there examples of male names that derive from female names?

There are a few examples from Germanic names: Deolindo or Teolindo are derived from Deolinda/Teolinda (modern German cognate: Dietlind).
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
5 votes

Is the study of proper names really a branch of linguistics?

Onomastics¹ has a big overlap with linguistics, specially with historical linguistics (derivation and meaning of names, sound shifts, etc.). Some valuable historical linguistic information is only ...
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
5 votes
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Does the southern pronunciation of Jenny have a triphthong in it?

Phonetically, I would say no. Here's a plot of this final vowel (taken from about 12.75 seconds into the linked video). It's not a great plot, since the recording quality I'm using isn't great, but ...
Draconis's user avatar
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5 votes

Is Latin Proto-Romance?

"Proto-X" tends to be used for the last common ancestor of X—the point at which the X languages started to diverge and become their own entities. This is why you'll sometimes hear about "pre-Proto-...
Draconis's user avatar
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5 votes

How did Shiloah (שילוח) become Siloam and Silwan?

I don't think any of these qualify as morphological changes. Koine Greek lacked a /ʃ/ phoneme, so Hebrew shin was regularly transcribed with sigma /s/. The final mu is, I think, a relic of mimation: ...
Draconis's user avatar
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4 votes
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Addressing others using names/titles vs pronouns

The term is named "Pronoun Avoidance" and you can see which languages avoid using pronouns for politeness in this map: https://wals.info/feature/45A#2/25.7/137.0 Also see the explanation in ...
MujjinGun's user avatar
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4 votes
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Origin of the family name affix "tom"

Dutch tom is clearly cognate to High German zum which is a contraction of zu dem "to the". The German preposition zu can be used both in a static sense ("at") and in a directional ...
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
4 votes
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Is the name "Melisande" related to the Latin for "honey", "Mel"?

It depends what you mean by "derived from". Lines of descent are often not as straightforward as dictionaries make them look! The name "Melisande" and its variants do seem to stem ...
Draconis's user avatar
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4 votes
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How and when was the name of Somalia written with س in Iran?

All foreign names and words with (S) letter which are entered into Persian are written in (س) . If we borrow a word from Arabic, we will write it exactly same as Arabic letters like( ص or ث ) ...
Alireza's user avatar
  • 106
3 votes
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Are names of dishes more prone to name change due to power / language shift?

A lot of the names of Egyptian dishes (as opposed to raw materials like fūl) are borrowed from Ottoman Turkish and are found also in Levantine Arabic, Greek, Serbian and other languages. This is ...
fdb's user avatar
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3 votes

Is the study of proper names really a branch of linguistics?

Proper names are created in many languages, often by taking an interpretable phrase and using it (e.g. the Shona names Chipo "gift", Farai "be happy (pl)!"), the name of the Tanzanian author ...
user6726's user avatar
  • 81.9k
3 votes

Why do some languages have many names?

The main reason is that a language name reflects some historical fact, and many different historical facts are available for naming a language. Typically, language names are related to an ethnic ...
user6726's user avatar
  • 81.9k
3 votes

Why are most given names so common?

First names are subject to Zipf's law of distribution (see this paper for some examples). This means that the most frequent name is roughly twice as common as the one after that and so on. The same ...
Dominik Lukes's user avatar
3 votes

Are there any languages or cultures that have genderless given names?

In Mongolian, there are a number of strictly neutral names, e.g. names derived from planets, names derived from rivers, or "bad" names or "non-names"*. There are also names that have a strong tendency ...
Jan's user avatar
  • 316
3 votes

Gender-based name endings: Are they common?

Most European female names end in "a" whether they are older or modern. The reason for this is the way Indo-European languages create gender in nouns. By analyzing the grammatical gender of the nouns ...
Iulia's user avatar
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