Why felame names tend to end in a vowel in many languages?

Question

sorry, I mean female.

Answer 1

First, note that the "many languages" you are looking at may be a cluster or related languages, such as the Romance languages. Now if a feature or tendency was found in Latin it isn't surpring to see it in various languages descended from Latin.

Connected to this, note that there are many English names DERIVED from Romance languages whose feminine forms end with -a or -e (the latter are usually from French)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Personal_names

Note also that these types of names are often formed by ADDING a feminine suffix. That is, there is "simple" or "base" form used for the masculine, from which a feminine form is created by adding a suffix, e.g., Robert > Roberta; Justin a> Justine).

This last feature also helps explain what's happening. It is very common in languages that have different forms for each gender, for the masculine form to be the simple form and the feminine to be formed by slightly altering that form, often by adding a special "feminine" suffix.

Just this sort of thing may be seen in Semitic languages, like Hebrew. Example: the word for "prince" is "sar"; adding the feminine ending -a(h) makes it "sara(h)" or "princess" [an English word which, note, is similarly formed by a suffix on the masculine form]**

**Actually, in EARLIER forms of many of these languages, there were often distinct endings for BOTH masculine and feminine forms... but as the languages became 'simplified' by losing various endings (such as "case endings" that mark their grammatical function in the sentence as subject, direct object, etc) the masculine endings might be dropped and the feminine endings retained in order to preserve a distinction.



These two "roots" account for a great many of the feminine names ending in vowels, and they only originally go back to a couple of languages.

Answer 2

Female names tend to end in a vowel so that men can tell if you are a girl without honking on your boobage.

Answer 3

Because vagina ends in a vowel.

Answer 4

Spanish.

Answer 5

Maybe English only.

Answer 6

That's going to bug me all day. I'm the only one in my family whose name dosen't.

Answer 7

What's "felame"? A person, place, or thing?

Answer 8

hmm.. i donno.. maybe bcuz it sounds more feminine