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:
“Annie: Dances like Pavaliver, that child.
George Grainger: Dances like who?
Annie: Pavaliver—the Russian dancer. Don’t be so ignorant.”
—Reginald Berkeley (1890–1935)
“Who are we? And for what are we going to fight? Are we the titled slaves of George the Third? The military conscripts of Napoleon the Great? Or the frozen peasants of the Russian Czar? No—we are the free born sons of America; the citizens of the only republic now existing in the world; and the only people on earth who possess rights, liberties, and property which they dare call their own.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness.... The expanses are so great that the little man hasn’t the resources to orient himself.... This is what I think about Russian suicides.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)