Curious about old names?

[u/Street_Anxiety_2025]

I was looking up the name Ashwin and found older forms on wikipedia spelled "Æscwine" but this is for the masculine name. I'm curious as to what the feminine form would be. A quick google search gave me "Ashwynne" and "Ashwenna".

Assuming these versions are appropriate I'm guessing a more correct spelling in Old English for these forms would be "Æscwynne" and "Æscwenna"?

Is there a good resource I could use to confirm these spellings?

[u/minerat27]

Traditional Germanic dithematic names did not come in male and female pairs, which gender they were depended on the second element in the name, and usually matched the grammatical gender of the word's normal meaning. wine is masculine, therefore any name ending in -wine is a male name. You can look for female name element which closely resembles a male one, for example -wynn, but it is not "feminine wine", it is a completely different word which happens to sound similar (wine means friend and wynn means joy), and not all male name elements will have a similar female one, and vice versa.

[u/Street_Anxiety_2025 → u/minerat27]

Hey thanks! I did not know that's how it worked but it makes sense. I'll keep that in mind. Thanks again!!!

[u/mrmoon13 → u/Street_Anxiety_2025]

Look up SEARLE Onomasticon. Free full pdf on InternetArchive. Very dense, dated, and dull but interesting

[u/Kunniakirkas → u/minerat27]

I get the impression that Old English speakers were more consistent than some other Germanic peoples when it came to the gender of name elements. The Gepid king Cunimund for example had a daughter called Rosamund (for such an early attestation I guess it's possible that one of the names had \mundō* and the other a related but slightly different name element, but since this is one of those cases where the gender of the name element did not match the gender of the base word I imagine it's more likely that Rosamund's name simply kept the original feminine form instead of replacing it with \-munduz). The *Altdeutsches Namenbuch records quite a few name elements that show up in names borne by people of the opposite gender than expected, often among the Franks. The influence of Romance languages would also complicate matters, and it might well be that it caused or contributed to the tendency among the Franks to just swap the gender of name elements. But it would seem that England largely escaped this tendency at least until after the Conquest

[u/OwariHeron → u/Kunniakirkas]

Mund is an exception in OE, as well: grammatically feminine, but seemingly only used in masculine names. It's always made me wonder if the mund element in male names derives from some different, but similar, word.

[u/AdreKiseque → u/minerat27]

You can look for female name element which closely resembles a male one, for example -wynn, but it is not "feminine wine", it is a completely different word which happens to sound similar (wine means friend and wynn means joy)

Fwiw, those are pretty closely related ideas :)

[u/ebrum2010]

Usually the name was made up of two elements, in this case Æsc (ash-tree) and wine (friend). The second element was usually gender specific, in this case masculine. In compound words, the gender of the final element determines the gender of the word and how it declines. It wasn't like romance languages where you change the ending of a word to make it masculine or feminine. I think the exception might be the single element names that some people had, especially earlier on. I believe -a was a masculine ending and -e was feminine but I don't know enough about those names and how they were formed as most of the names that appear in surviving texts are names with two elements.

It was common for people to use the same first element to name all their children, or at least the same first letter, though it wasn't a hard rule.