> Andrea (on-dre-ah vs and-ree-ah) is a true name collision.

What do you mean? The Italian male name Andrea and the English female name Andrea aren't unrelated names that happen to be spelled the same way. They are one and the same name, both derived from the Greek word for "man"; the Italian name has managed to remember that it's overtly masculine and the English name has forgotten this.

I mean that you can look at Daniele or Danielle and guess if it's an Italian guy or an American girl. You can't do the same for Andrea.

Danièle is the French spelling of the female name. It should have an accent, but in the US those get dropped regularly.

Both are pretty rare now, but Danielle is the more common spelling. It also matches the way the -elle is used as a suffix in many diminutives (e.g., cervelle, ruelle, passerelle)

Is -elle still a living suffix in French? I was under the impression that -ette is the standard.

-elle is pretty clearly descended from one of the usual Latin diminutives (also visible in e.g. Spanish tortilla). -ette seems to come from a much rarer one?

There's a fun map on Spanish wikipedia of which diminutive forms are preferred in which parts of Spain: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Diminutivos_del_espa%C...

> Is -elle still a living suffix in French? I was under the impression that -ette is the standard.

Yes, both are used commonly. In names, there are Gabrielle, Cyrielle, Annabelle, Axelle, and many others. I am not sure there is any rule.

-elle is not necessary a diminutive. In theophoric names such as "Michelle" and "Gabrielle" it is derived from the Hebrew El, a name for God.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabrielle_(given_name)

Another commenter believes, in Romance languages, that the "-a" feminine gendered suffix is diminutive compared to "-o" masculine or neuter suffixes, but that is not true. Not for Latin, or Spanish or Italian or even Greek.

They are only indirectly derived from the word "andros" = man.

They are directly derived from the feminine Greek word "andreia", meaning "courage" or "virility", which had been derived from "andros", as supposedly a quality typical for males.

> It is the Italian name which has forgotten that originally it was a feminine word, not the English, which has preserved the original grammatical gender.

That's not really what I said. The name is a masculine name. You can name your son "virility" without problems. If you try to do that to your daughter, you're going to have problems. The grammatical gender of the word is a separate concern.

And virility literally means manliness or manhood, and by extension physical qualities ideally associated with men. Romans had another concept, virtue, for manly mental qualities. Ancient Greek "andreia" covered both aspects of manliness.

Andrea as a female name is similar to Carla or Caroline. Take a name that means something related to men (but no longer obviously so) and adjust it a bit to make it a female name. As a male name it just reflects changes in pronunciation over time.

My name is Daniele (I'm from Italy), and I've been living in NY for a while. My real estate attorney name was Daniele as well (she's a woman,) it was extremely confusing at closing time.

Also, fun fact, I got invited to a ton Women in Tech stuff. I even got recruited to a company that was proud of having > 50% women in their teams. I assume that was because I was working on an OSS project (Chromium) and I had no avatar there.

Also, in the two FAANG companies I worked at I was added to women groups a few times.

> I don't know any women named Daniele or men named Danielle.

I wouldn’t be surprise to meet a (female) Daniele. The second L is already dropped somewhat regularly in Michelle. Which is interesting because it came from the French, but since then the French spelling drifted to "Michèle" (and then more or less fell completely out of fashion, and then seemed to come back for a while). In any case, both are pronounced exactly the same way.

"Andrea" is at its origin a feminine Greek word, but because its meaning is "courage" or "virility", in many places it became a name given to males.