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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My friends from Poland adopted a female cat named Sasha and were adamant that Sasha was a male name.
Also Sean. I think the Irish prefer Sinead or Siobhan instead for naming girls.
Similarly, “Andrea” is male in Italian but female in German.
Another I think is Rosario. A male name in Italy, a female name in Mexico/Spain.
True for any Spanish speaking country.
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.
"bar height is proportional to total births" - bars are horizontal, with uniform height.