Russian
Common Russian boys' names, such as Nikita (full name) and Misha (short for Mikhail), are assumed to be feminine in English, due to the 'a' termination, which is actually common in diminutive masculine forms. However, the 'a' termination does hold true for other Russian contexts, as the letter 'a' is appended to all Russian female last names (Ivanov's mother, wife, and daughter all have last name Ivanova; yet any son born out of wedlock to an Ivanova defaults back to last name Ivanov), and nearly all Russian feminine first names end in 'a' (or 'ya', a distinct letter in the Cyrillic alphabet). Also, nicknames (shortened versions of names) can be gender-ambiguous: Sasha (Alexandr or Alexandra), Zhenya (Yevgeniy or Yevgeniya).
Read more about this topic: Unisex Name
Famous quotes containing the word russian:
“I won the battle the wrong way when our worthy Russian generals were losing it the right way.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Now comes this Russian diversion. If it is more than just that it will mean the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination—and at the same time I do not think we need to worry about the possibility of any Russian domination.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is weak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)