alt Hacker NewsEnds in 'a' = female: a relatively safe assumption, as far as an assumption here can be safe, with no other context. A strong majority in many places will match that. Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling, which can go either way (may follow that culture's patterns, may not, highly varied).
Ends in vowel (sound) = female: probably mostly true, in that I strongly suspect it's >50%, but it's unreliable enough that I'd avoid trying to base any assumptions off it.
Names really follow no rules at all here. For both good and bad. E.g. most recently I ran across a "La-sia" pronounced "ladashsia". If it's spelled vat-ik'Nff and pronounced "King George" and they're female, then that's what's correct.
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> Ends in 'a' = female: a relatively safe assumption, as far as an assumption here can be safe, with no other context. A strong majority in many places will match that.
Which places? I guess I ask because your next sentence:
> Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling
Which makes me wonder if you meant "US places", because I can think of a few male names, which maybe categorised as "foreign" if you're in the US, that end in "a".
e.g. Csaba (pronounced "Chubba") is a reasonably common Hungarian name.
And some not so "foreign" ones, albeit mostly with Biblical roots, like Joshua and Ezra.
> Many of the exceptions will be obviously foreign names with traditional spelling, which can go either way
Or the names of biblical prophets like Ezra or Elisha. Not very popular today but you can find a lot of them in 19th century records.
See https://www.reddit.com r/tragedies for all sorts of, uhh, inventive spellings and names.
I mostly agree, but for example Andrea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea is a masculine name in Italian and a feminine name in Spanish. Here in Argentina it's mostly feminine, but if someone has many Italian ancestors, it may be masculine.
> It is part of the Italian male names ending in a, some others being Elia (Elias), Enea (Aeneas), Luca (Lucas), Mattia (Matthias), Nicola (Nicholas), Tobia (Tobias).
Edit: "Here in Argentina it's mostly masculine" -> "feminine"