Many names in Romance language preserve the ending of original declension from the Latin. The first declension feminine ending, the "base" name for a woman's na

Many names in Romance language preserve the ending of original declension from the Latin. The first declension feminine ending, the "base" name for a woman's name, is "a." Thus many Romance countries (and Christian countries, since many The Catholic Church requires the child to take the name of a saint for Baptism), have a disproportionate number of female names that end in "a." The "a" phenom signifying femininity is even suspected to go all the way back to Proto-Indo-European.