Why Do Names Change Gender?

comment like subscribe the bell keeps you notified it helps the show thrive names are pretty strange things they are a human made concept which means that names aren't bound to the laws of nature or physics or anything like that though despite that we've still decided to create rules and laws about these names these rules include having a correct way to spell and write these names people tend to get annoyed if you say or spell names wrong trust me though perhaps one of the strangest things about the rules we have given names is the fact that we've decided that many names should be linked to just one half of the population or another many names are linked to a specific gender or sex for example names like david john or alan are deeply linked with males while names like sophie claire or jennifer are deeply linked with females also just a quick side note on the terms i'm going to be using in this video when i say male female people in this video and sometimes i might just say men and women it points to what i mean are people who identify as those genders regardless of their biological sex as it seems names are more linked to a person's gender as opposed to their biological sex though of course things can get a lot more fluid with transgender people the relationship between transgender people and names is fascinating and will be a video unto itself someday side note aside however by and large in the year this video is being published 2022 if you were to name a woman brian or a man annabelle then most people would raise an eyebrow though while we might have applied all these rules to names the funnest thing about these rules is that they can be broken and changed people start spelling names differently and pronouncing them differently too and as well as breaking those rules many people like to break the rule about names being locked away to a specific gender nothing in the land of names is set in stone it seems and names have a long history of changing the gender they are linked with and becoming gender neutral too though it seems that by in large trout history it is more often male names becoming female names gender neutral names there really don't seem to be too many names that were initially female that have become male though let me know if there's any obvious ones i'm not thinking about down below and one other side note if you hadn't guessed already this video is based around names and gender in the english speaking world please let me know down below what kind of relationship names and genders have in your language anyway why is it the case of male names becoming female well it seems we can thank christianity for this fact names crossing between genders can be dated back to 16th century england around this time in history one of the key ways in which parents named their children was by using the names of saints found within the bible the majority of these saints however were men so there were way more male satan names to use than female saint names this didn't stop those medieval parents expecting daughters however parents of the middle ages would just use the names of male saints for their kids regardless if they were having a boy or a girl this means that names like nicholas philip and alexander were popular names for men and women yeah in the middle ages these names went from being linked to just men to becoming gender-neutral though you won't find many women these days with the names of nicholas philip or alexander you will however find women with the names of nicola philippa and alexandra these names are the female forms of these previously gender-neutral but now masculine names in fact there are many popular names we have in english that are simply female forms of male names this is one of the key ways in which names have changed gender take patricia as the female former patrick joanna as the female form of john pauline as the female form of pool also manafort as the female form of samuel some of these female forms haven't really stood the test of time however while henry is still a popular male name it's female form of henrietta whilst the known of name isn't massively popular and likewise the female form of thomas tomasina is pretty much unheard of what i also find fun about these male female forms of the names is the fact that while the full names are different the nicknames tend to be the same like a man called samuel and a woman called samantha can both be called sam likewise alexanders and alexandros are both known as alex though as we mentioned initially these names didn't have different forms between men and women they were just gender-neutral so how did these names gain different forms depending on gender well once again we have christianity to thank for that too the language most linked to christianity and is considered its holy language is latin latin is found all across christianity from sacred hymns and ancient texts being written in the language this is because it was via the roman empire under the rule of constantine the great when christianity started to pick up serious momentum after years of christian persecution in the roman empire constantine adopted it as his religion of choice with it shortly becoming the official religion of the empire as a whole and from there it grew into the world's most popular religion today as well as being the language of christianity latin is also a gendered language gender in language doesn't always relate to the gender of people or things it is talking about gender in language more often than not relates to the words rather than the individuals in latin for example the words for eye oculus and oculi are masculine despite the fact that men and women both have eyes however in latin first names change gender if they are being applied to men or women ancient latin did not have gender-neutral first names this meant that names had to be given feminine forms in latin when they got applied to women this created something of a dilemma for the christian church during the 16th century there were all these men and women walking around with the names of male saints like thomas and paul but because the church used latin as its de facto language it meant they were unable to record the names of these women in things like birth and mass difficult as thomas or paul because the structure and gender of latin wouldn't allow that despite the fact these were names being used for women they were still fundamentally male names and the rules of latin dictated that women's names can't be written in a masculine form so to combat this issue the church would simply create female forms with these names that wouldn't break the rules of latin this is how so many of these female forms of male names like patricia philippa and nicola came into being simply to meet the requirement of latin and christianity however while the church were writing the names of these women down like this it's believed that these latin forms of the names were not used in day-to-day speech while the church in the 16th century might have recorded a woman's name as philippa it's believed that she still would have been known by philip to most people were so when did we start using latin female forms of their names as actual women's names then well while we don't have an exact date it's easy to understand what might have happened the written word survived the medieval period a lot easier than the spoken word and as the years went on we would have had written evidence from the church of these names so people would have just started using them as women's names it's from here that the gap in different names for different genders really started to widen prior to which it was relatively small a lot of time has passed however since the 16th century and since this period the gap between gender names has become somewhat closer again with more and more names crossing from being male to female and a lot have also become gender neutral too names like sydney and morgan have become linked with both men and women some gender-neutral names however are differentiated by their spelling for example billy ending with a y is seen more as a male name while billy ended with an ie is seen more as a female name of course there are exceptions like billy joe armstrong being a male who uses the ie spelling though some names in more recent times have gone from being predominantly male to predominantly female names this shift really came about in the 20th century tracking the popularity of certain names in the usa between the years 1900 and 2000 really highlights this fact for example in the year 1900 madison was the 614th most popular boy's name but it didn't register as a girl's name at all but by the year 2000 madison was the third most popular girl's name and not registered as a boy's name at all other names that shifting gender in this century include the likes of leslie whitney gail aubry alison meredith and lauren in the year 1900 it wouldn't have been too strange to meet men with these names but 100 years later these names have all been forgotten by men and have become entrenched as women's names the gender shift in these names during this century happened for a variety of reasons one main reason being due to celebrities with these names lauren was a pretty rare man's name but in 1944 the actress lauren battle popularized the name for women it has taken just a couple of generations for these names to completely change gender that's not to say that these aforementioned names are exclusively female now however you still hear of men with these names like gail in breaking bad or the great commodity actor leslie nielsen who passed away just over 10 years ago though as mentioned these rules are constantly changing and to this day more traditionally male names are becoming female all of those previous examples came from the 20th century but in 2017 the names of ezra lincoln and austin were all given to hundreds of girls in the usa these are traditionally male names but the tide is changing on them it seems male names becoming female is no new thing from men and women using the same names in order of saints to the church creating female forms with these names to us humans in more recent years using male names for women once again with some becoming gender neutral while others being dropped by men more or less entirely and this shift keeps on happening to this very day who knows what male names will become popular female names in the future maybe in years time we will break down this concept of names being linked to certain genders entirely we will have little girls named dave a little boy named janet and no one will bat an eyelid this video topic was suggested by rory litwin over on my patreon every wednesday i put up a video request post over on my patreon for my awesome patrons to leave video ideas on i then pick one of those ideas to be turned into a video the following wednesday so if you have a great 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Channel: Name Explain

Views: 50,332

Keywords: name explain, etymology, word origins, gender names, names, langauge, gender

Id: WhL0LarQYd8

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2022