Visualizing the most common unisex names in the US | Hacker News Reader

Visualizing the most common unisex names in the US

nameplay.org

38 pointsaaronjbecker15 comments

To me, what's more interesting than the ranking is that the majority of the unisex names seem to be Celtic or Anglo-Saxon in origin.

Comparatively, there are very few Latin, Greek, or Hebrew names. Perhaps this is because names from the latter languages are still very closely associated with their gendered religious and mythological characters, while those associations have become more hazy with the former.

In old Semitic or Indo-European languages the human names, i.e. the proper nouns, were not unisex, but they had clearly different masculine or feminine declensions.

Actually the grammatical distinction between masculine and feminine nouns had appeared earlier in Afro-Asiatic (including Semitic) languages, and only later in Indo-European languages (perhaps caused by the contact with Semitic languages), where previously a grammatical distinction existed only between the names of animate things and non-animate things. By the time of Ancient Greek and Latin, the grammatical distinction between masculine and feminine nouns was already well entrenched in the European languages.

Many centuries later, a part of the European languages, including English, have lost the word terminations that distinguished the masculine names from the feminine names. Only then formerly different masculine and feminine names have merged into a single unisex name.

So there is no surprise in your observation, as it is caused by the difference in behavior between names that have been fixed in writing at an earlier time, preserving an older pronunciation, which included specifically feminine word terminations, and names that have been fixed in writing more recently, when there no longer existed different masculine and feminine name declensions.

As a language with gendered names, Portuguese, we still have a few like José, Maria, João and a few others, that are unisex.

However given that we usually have two first names, the other gender role happens with the second first name.

As an example how this goes, a girl can be named Maria João, and then it's on her if she rather be called Maria, or João, and by whom, usually different circles get to call her differently.

And so on for many possible combinations of male/female names being used in an unisex way.

Αngel is a funny one. For Anglo Americans I’ve only known girls by that name, but with Mexicans (born in Mexico) I’ve only known guys by that name as they have Angela for their girls.

Yeah there are a few names that become "unisex" only in the aggregate, with differently gendered usage across cultures-- Alexis is another I can think of, it's a girls' name in the US but a boys' name in most other countries.

Also Sean. I think the Irish prefer Sinead or Siobhan instead for naming girls.

Another I think is Rosario. A male name in Italy, a female name in Mexico/Spain.

Similarly, “Andrea” is male in Italian but female in German.

My friends from Poland adopted a female cat named Sasha and were adamant that Sasha was a male name.

True for any Spanish speaking country.

I'd like to see a stacked bar chart where the height/length is proportional to the total number of children. For instance, Robin and Kelley have percentage-wise roughly the same male representation, but in reality there are nearly 2x male Kelleys to male Robins it looks like.

I was born a bit ago, up until I was 12 I had only met 2 Ryan's and they were both women and oddly enough both doctors I saw because I was their patient.

Then my family moved to a different part of the country and I walked into a classroom with 7 Ryan's.

A fair number of these are surnames, and a century ago were probably seldom found as given names: Kelly, Morgan, Taylor, etc.

"bar height is proportional to total births" - bars are horizontal, with uniform height.

The height is uniform iff you measure height from the perspective of the rotation of the bar rather than the perspective of the chart. Confusing wording, but they meant the displayed vertical size in the chart instead of the length of the bar.

I think a traditional vertical stacked bar chart would have been far better.

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