alt Hacker News> Andrea (on-dre-ah vs and-ree-ah) is a true name collision.
What do you mean? The Italian male name Andrea and the English female name Andrea aren't unrelated names that happen to be spelled the same way. They are one and the same name, both derived from the Greek word for "man"; the Italian name has managed to remember that it's overtly masculine and the English name has forgotten this.
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bsimpson • yesterday at 11:04 PM
I mean that you can look at Daniele or Danielle and guess if it's an Italian guy or an American girl. You can't do the same for Andrea.
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They are only indirectly derived from the word "andros" = man.
They are directly derived from the feminine Greek word "andreia", meaning "courage" or "virility", which had been derived from "andros", as supposedly a quality typical for males.
It is the Italian name which has forgotten that originally it was a feminine word, not the English, which has preserved the original grammatical gender.
In Indo-European languages, most of the nouns denoting qualities have the feminine grammatical gender, so "andreia" is not an exception.