What do you call a daughter with the same name as her mother? Is there a female equivalent for 'junior' in the english language?
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3Combine the two - Juniorita!– GdDApr 25, 2013 at 15:44
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1I'm migrating this to english.se as it really isn't as much about parenting as about language, and the top-voted answer approaches it from that perspective.– BeofettApr 26, 2013 at 13:22
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1Relevant piece of pop-culture flotsam: The Doonesbury character JJ—the performance artist who was once married to Michael Doonesbury and who now lives with Zeke Brenner (aka Uncle Stupid)—is the daughter of Joanie Caucus, and her initials actually stand for Joan Junior.– Sven YargsJul 30, 2015 at 19:50
2 Answers
While you may choose a nickname to differentiate in daily use, for legal or genealogical purposes, she is a "junior." According to Wikipedia:
The most common name suffixes are senior and junior, most frequent in American usage, which are written with a capital first letter ("Jr." and "Sr.") with or without an interceding comma. The British English abbreviations are "Jnr" and 'Snr', respectively. The term "junior" is correctly used only if a child is given exactly the same name as his or her parent...
Although there are instances of daughters who are named after their mothers and thus use the suffix "Jr." (such as Winifred Sackville Stoner, Jr., Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, Jr., and Carolina Herrera, Jr.) or after their grandmothers with the suffix "II", this is not common. Usually, the namesake is given a different middle name and so would not need a suffix for differentiation. Furthermore, once the woman marries she would most commonly take the surname of her husband and thus do away with the generational suffix. The title "Jr." is sometimes used in legal documents, particularly those pertaining to wills and estates, to distinguish among female family members of the same name.
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2Nice, I thought Jr. was reserved for boys but I guess I was wrong.– Omar JackmanApr 25, 2013 at 14:48
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3In Latin (from which it is derived), iunior inflects the same for both masculine and feminine genders, as it's third declension. Jun 30, 2014 at 12:36
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Although nobody seems to have told a certain female writer of Roman whodunnits, grumble grumble, all Republican Roman females had the same name, and only one, to wit the family name (nomen). IOW, no Roman woman had a given name or forename (praenomen). Awful, ain't it? Mother and daughter generally had different nomina (wives did not take their husband's) so were not a problem. But they had to distinguish among a clutch of sisters. They used a suffix -illa, as in Julilla, Agrippinilla etc. or a nickname. May 1, 2015 at 13:09
For fathers and sons who share a name, you sometimes see the French words "père" ("father") and "fils" ("son") used instead of "senior" and "junior". In the same way, one could perhaps use "mère" and "fille" for a mother and daughter.
However, it should be noted that I can find no actual evidence for this usage. And anyway, even "père" and "fils", though well-established, may strike some English-speakers as pretentious.