Name Game

Sooo many things to say. Unfortunately I haven't written in almost 2 weeks; shocking, I would think I have something more to say.

Anyway, I guess a few things that have struck me over the past 13 days are as follows:

1) I heard a group of girls of different races (and one boy) talking about different girl names that pertain to a certain race, that race being African American. Of course they mentioned the video that goes over the "Top 60 Ghetto Black Names" but what struck me as funny was when one of the girls asked where the name Shaniqua came from. The guy proceeded to look it up on Wikipedia but before he answered, another girl asked if it was a "feminisation" of the name Sean/ Shawn. I hadn't thought about that before. It would make sense looking back at the development of Western Civilization. Samuel and Samantha, Lawrence and Lauren/ Laura, Andrew and Andrea, or even Joseph and Josephine. Even the way we address people, Senor and Senorita for example.

So I started to wonder whether or not this is actually how it happened; are most Western female names just derivatives of male names? Were women named as extension of men? Since mothers/ fathers of early civilizations would 1) be expecting a boy and 2) not have the ability to tell which gender the baby is, would they just prepare the name of the child for a boy and when the surprise of a vagina appeared they just altered the name to fit the new baby?

I guess this doesn't really change the gender roles we have today (as girls are hopefully just as wanted as boys), and I guess since people are actually making up names for babies to fit what they feel it doesn't matter so much, but it was an interesting insight into what might have been the reasoning behind naming a child.