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IncreasePosts • today at 6:23 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

Andrea, Simone, Nicola, Michele, Daniele in Italian are all male names, but English speakers would probably assume the person is female from the name alone.


Replies

Fnoord • today at 6:59 PM

True, good native and traditional cultutal exceptions of a rule of thumb. Speaking for myself (NL) we have a small amount of Italian names and heritage (also due to Catholicism), and say NYC would have much more Italian descendants.

Also, as someone who saw quite some football (non-US version), I ofcourse am familiar with a lot of names. For example, Andrea Pirlo. We also learn some via history at school, since Italy plays a prominent role in Europe's history. Regarding Nicola, people might be familiar with Nikola Tesla (the 'c' in this case, sounds like 'k') and it is just a variant of 'Nico', 'Nicole', 'Nicolas'. Then there's some dude at FIFA, 'Gianni' which is a variant of 'Jean', 'Jan', 'Jeanne', 'Janet', 'Jannie', 'Janine', etc. I could go on about Gianluigi Buffon...

What I just remind myself with regards to Italian is it tends to add a vowel at end of a word or name, but it often doesn't sound same in English or my native tongue (Dutch).

bsimpson • today at 7:36 PM

Andrea (on-dre-ah vs and-ree-ah) is a true name collision.

Michele and Daniele look like misspellings of Michelle and Danielle though. I don't know any women named Daniele or men named Danielle.

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pepperoni_pizza • today at 8:56 PM

Around here, all of these would be male with the last vowel removed and female with it.

quickthrowman • today at 8:24 PM

Yes, I would assume those are feminine names.

The closest English male names to your examples are Andre/Andrew, Simon, Nicholas/Nick, Michael/Mike, Daniel/Dan. Gianni is John, etc