whAt's In A nAmE?

whAt's In A nAmE?

Whenever you read or hear a list of names, generally what are the things that are going to strike you? From which place that person is? i.e. the ethnicity. The person’s religion- Hindu, Sikh, Moslem, Christian etc? Another important thing that is going to strike you is the gender-Male or female?

On reading or hearing a name in most of the cases it’s not difficult to make out the gender. One can easily identify the feminine touch in the female names. But What about names like Kiran(it may be Kiran Bedi or even Kiran More!) Sheetal, Swaroop, Pritham, Suman, Kanchan??

Well these are a few names that are used commonly for both the sexes.

Consider a few names:

1. Anil, Ratnakar, Rahul, Sachin, Amithab, Dhanraj.....

2. Sushmita, Preethi, Anju, Kalpana, Sunitha, Aishwarya, Ujjwala....

3. Kiran, Sheetal, Pritham, Suman, Kanchan, Madhur, Swaroop, Roshan, Neelam........

4. Ravi, Shiva, Kishore, Bala..........

Confused as to why these 4 different groups? Before going into that, a small note - I’m considering only Hindu names here. Well on having a closer look at the groups one can fairly make out that the names in group 1 & 3 end with a consonant where as names in groups 2 & 4 end with vowels. Also one can see that groups 1 & 4 contain exclusive male names and group 2 contains exclusive female names and group 3 has names common to both sexes. Well if you would randomly pick a name and try to place it in one of the 4 groups, then in 9 out of 10 cases you would end up in group 1 or 2!! Interesting right. So in brief, if you randomly select a male name then in most cases it ends with a consonant and if its a female name in most cases it ends with a vowel (even in that 'a' is the most likely terminating alphabet and then 'i' is the second most likely). Reason: Almost all Hindu names are derived from Sanskrit, and in Sanskrit only 'aa' and 'ee' are the female 'karanthaas'. So the female names generally end with ‘a’ or ‘i’.

It’s also important to note that the spelling/pronunciation of some names is affected by the accent of the people. Viz. people in south India tend to add ‘a’ at the end of even male names. Example ‘Rama’, which is originally ‘Ram’. Shiva(Shiv), Krishna(Krishn), Harsha(Harsh).

Now group 3 is of special interest to us, names common to both sexes, which seem to end with a consonant!!

Now based on the above observation i would like to generalise and put forward a few postulates:

1. A female Indian name usually ends with a vowel.(a/i/u)

2. A male Indian name usually ends with a consonant.

3. If you have selected a female name and if its terminating with a consonant, then its very likely that its a name common to both the gender.

4. The inverse of "3" doesn't hold. i.e if you select a male name & it ends with a vowel then its not necessary that it has to be a gender neutral name.

Well the above stated postulates can have exceptions.Though the postulates have been stated taking Indian Hindu names into account, the first & second postulates may fairly hold good for other ethnicity/religion as well.