Conference thebay::joyoflex

    Leave it to somebody to bring this up! :-)
    
    Actually, "Michael" and "George" can be feminine names as well.
    (Michael Learned and Nancy Drew's friend)
    
    As for the question at hand, I don't see a real problem, as I
    feel that the choice of a name is purely an aesthetic consider-
    ation. Coincidentally, I don't find most of the feminine forms
    listed particularly pleasing to my eye (no offense to anyone with
    any of those names; for the record, I don't care much for *my*
    given name, "Jerel", either).
    
    --- jerry

    The only 'problem' I have with my name is the occasional 
    junk mail it causes to be addressed to Ms. Billie Robinson.
    Whoever she is, she ain't me.
    
    Bill
    
    (whose dad was born in Oklahoma where they give boys and girls
     names like Tommie, Bobbie, etc)

    I was the only boy in my graduating High School class to receive
    a gold-embossed invitation to enroll in the Texas State College
    for Women. Like a fool, I threw it away!
    
    Lynn Yarbrough

     Or how about names that sound the same, but are spelled differently?
    When my father-in-law was named Clare it was a popular name, now it is
    seldom (if ever??) used to name a boy. The feminine is Claire.
     Which lead to an embarrassed moment for an air force lieutenant,
    who being new to the squadron, and the admin. officer, thought to
    have a luncheon for the women in the squadron (NCO and Officers).
    Looking through the squadron roster she saw Clare and sent out an 
    invitation. My father-in-law responded that he was sorry, but he 
    had a previous appointment and couldn't meet with the ladies.
     The family all know him as Jerry (his middle name).

    There's also Carol/Carroll, as in Carroll O'Connor, the actor who
    played Archie Bunker, and Carroll Spinney, who plays Sesame Street's
    Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. Both are men.
    

    Re .4
    
    > The family all know him as Jerry
    
    Speaking of unisex names?
    
    Also how about Chris and Pat?  (They, along with Leslie, being the
    cast of one of Hofstadter's stories.)
    
    In fact, I would think that any non-unisex name would be sexist.
    (Non-unisex?  Is that bisexual?  Wait a minute, something seems
    backwards here.)
    
    Re .0
    
    I thought the feminine equivalent of Michael was Michelle.

    How about names that have changed their sex orientation?  Artemis was a 
    Greek godess of the moon, wild animals, and hunting (twin sister of 
    Apollo).  In today's society Artemis is considered a *male* name.  
    
    My favorite complaint is the mispronunciation of names.  My son's name is
    Darius.  
              Popular mispronunciation : dairy-us
             The correct pronunciation : dah-rye-us
    
    Odds are that most dictionaries would consider *both* correct.
    
    Steve Gene Gemmel

    re .7:
    
    Actually, there are a couple of rules regarding names. The first and
    most important is that one may pronounce one's name however one wants.
    "It's spelled Luxury-Yacht, but pronounced Throat-Warbler-Mangrove."
    Consequently, any comments about how a name is "supposed" to be
    pronounced have to be taken in context. About all you can really say is
    "My name is supposed to be pronounced...."
    
    And as far as "Darius" in particular goes, "dairy-us" is a perfectly
    reasonable pronunciation. The reason is that in both Latin and Greek,
    the accent on a word is placed on the antepenultimate (second from the
    last) syllable. The historical Darius was a Persian, and I really have
    no notion as to how he pronounced his name; I am willing to accept that
    he pronounced is "dah-rye-us." However, anyone seeing "Darius" in print
    could reasonably reckon that it is to be pronounced "dairy-us," as this
    is likely to be a Greek or Latin transliteration of whatever the
    Persian was. You may complain that most dictionaries would consider
    both pronunciations to be "correct" and this seems reasonable to me.
    
    	Jon

re .6

Michelle is another feminine form of Michael.  I guess Michaela is a
little less common.

Paul is another masculine name with more than one feminine counterparts:
Paula, Pauline, Paulette.

Dave C.

sexist? heck no....   I don't mind if men like our names so much that they
adapt them a bit for themselves!

--Angela

    Although I agree with .8 that Luxury-Yacht is properly to be pronounced
    Throat-Warbler-Mangrove, I still find it educational to explore how
    names might have been pronounced before linguistic evolution and
    bastardization formed them into the names we know today.  (Note that
    I'm not calling evolution and bastardization bad; they are simply the
    mechanisms of change.)  Some names really get run through the wringer;
    Gaius Iulius Caesar, which we pronounce GAY-us JOO-lyus SEE-zer, was
    pronounced Gye-ooss Yuuule-ee-ooss Kize-ar (oo as in boot, not foot,
    but of very short duration) by its most prominent bearer.  Even the
    syllabification is different, as you can see form the locations of my
    hyphens.
    
    Classical Romans would have pronounced Darius as daaahrr-ee-ooss.  This
    is close to, but not identical with, DAIR-y-us.  This places the accent
    on the first syllable, which is, as .8 says, the antepenultimate
    syllable.  But note, here and in Caesar above, that I do not indicate
    more force on that syllable; rather, the accent in Latin affects the
    sound of the vowel and the duration of its syllable.  (The vowel sound
    tends to drift in the direction of a schwa in short syllables, but it
    is always more defined than a pure schwa.)  There is no inherent
    variation in force between syllables in classical Latin; force is used
    to convey semantic emphasis only.

    Re Darius: I'm not sure about how the Persians pronounced the vowels,
    but I'm pretty sure that they pronounced the final consonnant as SH
    (i.e. something like Dariosh rather than Darius).
    			Denis.

    Where was all this phonetically recorded?  My classics teacher, who
    certainly didn't accomplish as much with me as Dick Binder's did with
    him, said, "We don't know how the ancient Greeks and Romans pronounced
    their words."  

    There are surviving ancient books of the "You're a _nouveau_riche_
    provincial who wants to know how to talk like an educated man" sort,
    as well as more scholarly writings.  Some of them include descriptions
    of where to put your tongue when saying "u" and so on, and are thus
    equivalent to phonetic descriptions.  
    
    Another source is rhymed verse: if (to take an English example) "bear"
    rhymes with "hair", but not with "read", then we know something about
    the sounds involved.  Mispellings are also a guide (the English 
    version of this is seeing "mute" for "moot", "kat" for "cat", and
    "anser" for "answer").  Quantitative verse tells you other things.
    Imitations of rustics and barbarians (along the lines of "Ah thowt Ah
    done told ya") give hints. 
    
    A third method is comparative reconstruction using modern languages.
    
    A combination of the above gives a pretty good guide to Latin and
    Greek phonetics.  On the other hand, some of this is only recently
    widely known--the "new" Latin pronounciation (/kayser/ for "Caesar")
    was new in the thirties, if my memory of references in peoples'
    autobiographies is correct.
    
    One thing we don't know is Egyptian vowels.  They didn't write them,
    and modern Coptic is different enough that it's only a poor guide.
    
    		-John Bishop