Italian Roots and Genealogy
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Italian Roots and Genealogy
How to understand the origins of Italian surnames Part 1
In part 1 Raffaele Fontanella explains the origins of surnames from the renaissance, how dialects impacted first names and surnames based on his book "Cognomi di Stabia". How the Romans used first names, surnames and nicknames. How the Germans named people and how that impacted Italian names. And an introduction to part 2 where he will explain the 4 naming conventions in Italy.
Could you imagine a country with more surnames than most nations have people? Join us as we uncover the secrets behind Italy's astonishing 300,000 surnames with our special guests, Raffaele Fontanella, an expert in Italian linguistics, and his translator Rich DiPalma. Raffaele walks us through the captivating world of Italian surnames, revealing how Italy's rich linguistic diversity and unique use of prefixes and suffixes have created a multitude of last names. Rich also shares his personal experience with Raffaele, highlighting the profound connections between language and heritage in Italy, and how uncovering these links can be a deeply personal and enlightening journey.
Explore the medieval naming practices that shaped Italian society, especially within noble families. Discover the intriguing story of Bob's great-grandmother, Caracciolo, whose multiple names were more than just a tradition—they were a necessity to preserve noble lineages and distinguish individuals in an ever-growing population. From patronymics and place names to professions and nicknames, we'll trace the origins of these second names and their evolution into the essential identifiers they are today. Tune in for an enlightening episode that peels back the layers of Italy's historical and cultural tapestry through the lens of its surnames.
Riusciresti a immaginare un paese con più cognomi di quanti siano gli abitanti della maggior parte delle nazioni? Unisciti a noi mentre scopriamo i segreti dietro gli incredibili 300.000 cognomi italiani con i nostri ospiti speciali, Raffaele Fontanella, esperto di linguistica italiana, e il suo traduttore Rich De Palma. Raffaele ci accompagna attraverso l'affascinante mondo dei cognomi italiani, rivelando come la ricca diversità linguistica dell'Italia e l'uso unico di prefissi e suffissi abbiano creato una moltitudine di cognomi. Rich condivide anche la sua esperienza personale con Raffaele, evidenziando i profondi legami tra lingua e patrimonio in Italia e come scoprire questi legami possa essere un viaggio profondamente personale e illuminante.
Esplora le pratiche di denominazione medievali che hanno plasmato la società italiana, specialmente all'interno delle famiglie nobili. Scopri l'intrigante storia della bisnonna di Bob, Caracciolo, i cui molteplici nomi erano più di una semplice tradizione: erano una necessità per preservare i lignaggi nobili e distinguere gli individui in una popolazione in continua crescita. Dai patronimici e nomi di luogo alle professioni e ai soprannomi, ripercorreremo le origini di questi secondi nomi e la loro evoluzione negli identificatori essenziali che sono oggi. Sin
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Hi everyone, this is Bob Sorrentino, from Italian Roots and Genealogy. Be sure to check out our blog and our YouTube and our newsletter and our great sponsors, your Dolce Vita Italy, rooting Phil Italy and Abbiative Casa. And today I have a great guest, raffaele Fontanella, who's written a book about our Italian surnames and and the origin of those, and a good friend of his and mine, rich De Palma, who's going to translate for us. So welcome guys. Thanks for being here.
Speaker 2:Grazie, buona sera.
Speaker 1:So Rich. Why don't you give a little brief history of yourself, and then you could ask Rafael to do the same?
Speaker 3:Okay, I'm Rich De Palma. I'm an eighth grade Italian teacher in Connecticut and I met Raffaele, though we haven't met in person yet. I hope to meet him someday because my dad's family is from Castella Mare di Stabia, right outside of Naples and near Pompeii that area of Italy and it was the only part of my family tree I never had any luck researching and I hired Raffaele and he and his son Simone. They figured out the problem. The problem was that before my great-grandfather, all of his ancestors were actually from Abruzzo and they sometime moved to Castellammare, probably for the shipbuilding between 1875 and 1879. And ever since then, raffaele took the tree back like 200 years earlier. It was a phenomenal experience. Hai capito.
Speaker 2:Raffaele.
Speaker 3:Tutto. Ho capito Una presentazione di te stesso.
Speaker 2:Ah ok, grazie. La prima cosa è che sono molto, molto contento di stare qui con voi. A presentation of yourself Ah ok, thank you. The first thing is that I am very happy to be here with you. The second thing is that it seems to me a duty to thank both Bob Sorrentino for the hospitality and, clearly, my friend Rick Di Palma for the tradition.
Speaker 3:Ok, first things. First, he's extremely happy to be here, and the second is he wants to thank you, bob, for having him here, and he's happy to also be in touch with me too for the first time, sort of.
Speaker 2:I am a professor of economics and then I am also a graphic designer. I have been studying graphics for almost 40 years, but I have always been passionate about linguistics, that is, understanding what words are, where they come from or the ways of saying economics and he also is a graphic designer.
Speaker 3:He's done all of this for about 40 years, but he's also had a great great. He's always been very passionate about languages in general, linguistica and especially like the roots of words, the etymology of words, and I think that's where this basis of all these surnames comes into E infatti, tra le parole, l'etimologia delle parole, un interesse particolare per I cognomi. Okay, in addition to just the origin of words, specifically last names too.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and in fact I remember as a boy, as a child, that when I heard my last name I said but why do I have that last name? Or rather, what did that last name mean?
Speaker 3:And then, little by by little, I did these researches so much so that I wrote a nice book on the origin of surnames. Do I have that name? And then, a little by little, you know, he just was interested more and more in the origin of last names, and that's when he decided to create this book italiano.
Speaker 2:da un record italiano, l'italia in tutto il mondo ha il maggior numero di cognomi rispetto agli altri stati.
Speaker 3:Okay, so he wants to tell us a little bit about last names in general, specifically Italian. He said that Italians actually, as an ethnic group, have more last names than any group really in the whole world world 300,000 300,000 over 300,000 If we compare it with China, which we know is big and we know that it has about a billion people, and instead Italy has 60 million people.
Speaker 2:We would expect China to have many nicknames. Instead, China has only 7,000, 7,000, while Italy, as Bob said, 350,000. Mentre l'Italia, come ha detto Bob, 350.000 cognomi.
Speaker 3:Okay, so it says. He says, if we were to compare as a group, italy and China, which we know has more than a billion people, only Italy 60 million, he said, in China there's only 7,000 last names, where in Italy, like you said Bob, you said what? 300,000?
Speaker 2:That's just amazing and I'll ask you this question, but I'll answer it. The question is this why does Italy have all these last names? And the answer is this is that we have, we Italians, but I also hope you call it Italy. We have a wonderful language that, to make some concepts, uses prefixes and suffixes. Bob translate.
Speaker 3:Wait, so why? The question is why do we have so many last names? And he said he wants to answer? Is we have such a beautiful, a wonderful language that to express some of these concepts, Italians use so many suffixes and prefixes and variations of just one simple word. Sometimes that translates into also a lot of different last names.
Speaker 2:Bravo. Infatti tu prima hai detto che il mio cognome si poteva tradurre come Little Fountain, mentre la parola in italiano è fontana e noi possiamo fare per esempio l'accrescitivo dicendo fontanone, oppure una piccola fontana, fontanina o fontanaccia o fontanella. Avete visto quanti cognomi partendo solo da fontana, fontanina o fontanaccia o fontanella? Avete visto quanti cognomi partendo solo da fontana?
Speaker 3:So he said, just like the last name, the word fontana is fountain. So if you had like a bad fountain, it'd be fontanaccia. If you had a big fountain, fontanone. If you have a little fountain, fontanina, a cute, adorable fountain, fontanella E Raffaele, se posso aggiungere. If I'd like to add also Bob, your last name is a diminutive, sorrentino, right? No?
Speaker 2:no, no, Never mind, I'm wrong. No, perché in italiano la parte finale inno rappresenta l'ettrico, cioè abitante di Sorrento. Ah, capito, See etymical, that is the inhabitant of Sorrento, oh. I see, I learned today I've learned Okay, okay, okay, like the termination in ano, like Napoletano, so the inhabitant of Naples.
Speaker 3:Okay. So he's saying actually, when it comes to places like Sorrento, Sorrentino doesn't mean small, it means an inhabitant of the place.
Speaker 2:Okay, it seems like a diminutive, but it's not a diminutive.
Speaker 3:He said it seems like it's almost like a nickname or to make something smaller, but in this case it's actually not.
Speaker 1:Well, my mother was from Puglia, Nicoletti.
Speaker 2:For example, nicoletti is perfect. Why? Let's take an example In English the surname could be only Nicol or Naikon I don't know Nicol While we in the family environment, for example, a little child called Nicola, we can call him Nicolino, or a fat Nicola, we can call him Nicolone. Right, and this in patronymic function, which I will tell you in a moment what it means, is fixed as a surname. Poco vi racconterò. Le significa si è fissato come cognome. Perciò, per esempio, se in inglese c'è solo Andrew, che sarebbe Andrea come cognome, in italiano me ne posso dire forse 20, 30. Andre de Andres, andretta, andreotti, andreini, and so on.
Speaker 3:Okay, aspetta. So he was saying, how you know, he used the word Nichols or Nicholas, really, as an example. You know you could have Nicolone for a big kid, or Nicolino for a small Nicholas, but it also translates into last names. Same thing with Andrea, andrew, you could have Andre, you could have Andre, the plural could have de andre, you could have andreotti, all these. And he said he'll explain why, why there's all these different variations italiano.
Speaker 3:And this is the reason that one last name, sort of like Andrews in English, might have 20 equivalents in Italian.
Speaker 2:Ok, poi, un altro motivo del fatto che in italiano abbiamo tantissimi cognomi è la cosiddetta and the so-called linguistic frant Italian. They're from Latin, they've grown up together from Latin and that's why there's all these variations within Italy. Bravissimo E per cui una parola latina è stata detta pronunciata in 20 o 30 modi diversi. Che sono le regioni italiane.
Speaker 3:So some of these words that were in Latin were actually spoken in sometimes 20 different ways, depending on where you were in Italy saying the same word Exactly.
Speaker 2:In fact, I'll give you a practical example Pasquale is the Italian name, then there is also Pasquale. I think there is also Pasquale in America. Pasquale is Neapolitan, that is, it is to pronounce Pasquale in Neapolitan, and so there are many nicknames in Italy that have felt the by the dialects.
Speaker 3:So these last names exist today. There's Pasquale, there's Pascale, there's just De Pasquale, di Pasquale, and it's because of the origin of these dialects before the language was sort of standardized.
Speaker 2:Un altro esempio che mi sono scritto sempre per voi, of the origin of these dialects. In the north it is used with the Z, so Zanni. In the center, gianni with the G and in the south, janni, also with the J. And of these three ways of saying it, imagine how many surnames were born, for example the Annelli, the Annotti. They are all, giovanni said, in the north, in the center and the south, in the north traditionally it was almost with a Z Giovanni, or however he said it Giovanni.
Speaker 3:Giovanni, and I know like where Columbus was from. In Genoa they used the letter Z a lot, lot more In the center. It was more of the standard G, Giovanni, Gianni.
Speaker 2:Bravo Giannini. For example, the surname Giannini is from central Italy.
Speaker 3:Okay, so the last name, Giannini, is from central Italy and in the south it even was more of that Iuanne Iuanne with that J sound, where it's almost like a Y in English and it goes more back to Latin Latin, where it was Ioannis I or I A or something like that. And so think of how many last names have come from that one name.
Speaker 1:So now, that's very interesting because and I'll say why my uncle. He didn't come from Torito until 1950. He was left behind when my grandparents came, so we always called him Uncle John, of course, in English, but my grandmother Called him Gioan Gioan. Gioan Gioan, bravo, così, From Torito Bari.
Speaker 2:Ah, bari, puglia, Puglia. Ok, poi entriamo nel vivo della conoscenza, della formazione dei cognomi. Un piccolo riferimento storico è che nell'impero romano esistevano tre nomi per identificare le persone. A small historical reference is that in the Roman Empire there were three names to identify people, and there was the first name, there was the first name and then the last name. The first name Go go go.
Speaker 3:So back in the days of the Roman Empire there were three ways to sort of identify a person. There was the pre-nomen, which he said, then there's the nomen and then the cognomen. So I'm assuming in English that would be like your first name, pre-name, maybe name, and then it probably became last name.
Speaker 2:but you continue name and then it probably became last name, but you continue, bravo. And in fact, in french if you know french well the name is called pre-name okay, so if you know french well, name is called pre-name and say that again Okay. Oh and so the word last name in French is just nom. If we take the example of Julius Caesar, that everybody knows His name si chiamava Caio Giulio Cesare.
Speaker 3:His name was Caio Giulio Cesare or Gaius Julius Caesar.
Speaker 2:Bravi in inglese, bravissimo, Scusa, in latino Caio Giulio Caesar. Okay, quindi, Caio era il nostro nome, come Rick or Bob.
Speaker 3:So Caio really was or Gaius was really just his name, like you're Bob and he's Raffaele and I'm Rich.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Julius was his family name, so like our last names today, exactly.
Speaker 2:And then the surname was a nickname. How do you cognomen? Era un soprannome, come si dice in inglese soprannome, nickname. Ah, nickname Era il nickname E non so se sapete che Cesare significava con gli occhi celesti. Ah, I didn't know that. Quindi probabilmente Giulio Cesare aveva gli occhi celesti.
Speaker 3:So he said that Caesar was more of like a nickname and it actually meant someone with light blue eyes.
Speaker 2:Wow, Bene, questo qua. Poi che cos'è successo? Che dopo l'impero romano l'impero romano cade e arrivano dal nord le popolazioni germaniche.
Speaker 3:So, after the fall of the Roman Empire and people from Northern Europe started to come into, you know, Italy.
Speaker 2:Okay, and I don't know if you know that the Germanic peoples used only one name to identify people. Okay, so, the Germanic peoples, these barbarians, really, they used to only use one name to identify people Lightning, okay bravo. Cloud, ok bravo. Oppure. Nuvola, oppure come gli animali, lupo leone, eccetera.
Speaker 3:So he said that they used to only use words that were more connected with nature, so they would have names like lightning and cloud and lion and other animal names.
Speaker 2:Ok, quindi, siccome anche in inglese il cognome si dice o second name o last name, che significa l'ultimo nome giusto, Last name, L'ultimo nome, Surname. Quindi per gli uomini del passato l'unico vero, vero nome era il nome il primo nome, giusto right?
Speaker 3:So back in the day he's saying more in English again. It was just your first name, really.
Speaker 2:The only true, real name that you had was just your first name gli studiosi, appunto, dei cognomi, come dire, considerano il cognome il secondo nome giusto yeah, we consider our last. Well, no, secondo nome, in italiano sarebbe middle name no, no, il nome che viene dopo il first name. Oh, you're talking l'ordine?
Speaker 3:the order esatto, bravo. Oh si, si, si, we say our last name, second, ok.
Speaker 2:Oppure anche lo chiamano I linguisti, nome aggiunto. Come possiamo dire in inglese? An added name, an added name Esatto. Esatto Perché, ripeto il nome era la cosa più importante. Pensate che nei registri che io e mio figlio Simone consultiamo del 600, think about it in the records that my son and I consult from the 1600s and 1700s. This is a very good news.
Speaker 3:the records with all the names of the people are listed by name, not by surname years ago that the first name was really the important name and that afterwards these last names were added on. They were like a second name or an added name. So he said imagine when he and his son are doing the research from a book from the 1600s and they're looking through an index, they're not alphabetized by last names but alphabetized by the person's first name.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've seen that.
Speaker 2:I've seen that, yeah. So for example, for Bob Sorrentino in the register we have to go with the B, not the S.
Speaker 3:But Bob is a nickname. You know, bob is a nickname, right? No, bob is a nickname for Roberto.
Speaker 2:Then let's do Robert Sorrentino. So if there was a Robert Sorrentino in the 1600s instead of in the, instead of with the s's so.
Speaker 1:So I have a question I'm going to put in the chat. I'm going to put in the chat my great grandmother's names on her birth record. She was, was, from. She was Coatulo de Tokirolo and this is her names on her birth certificate. If he looks in the chat Lutgaard, what is that?
Speaker 2:I don't understand Rick.
Speaker 3:This is. Who is this Bob?
Speaker 1:Your great-grandmother's birth certificate, my great-grand grandmother's birth certificate. She was from a noble family, caracciolo, okay.
Speaker 3:Caracciolo è una famiglia nobile. He just said okay, sua bisnonna, la bisnonna di Bob, come ha detto, era da una famiglia nobile E sul lato di nascita, those names, tutti quei nomi that's c'erano scritti sul cerca so the question is why did they have all those names?
Speaker 2:So it's quite easy, because when you married a husband and wife of different families, it was important to keep the name or the last name, the importance and the honor of the noble families.
Speaker 3:He said it was important to keep the names of these noble families, you know, because they were just important names and the honor of having that last name. So these kids had so many names because they just kept adding on all these different lines when the royalty or nobles married each other.
Speaker 1:So he said back in the.
Speaker 3:Middle Ages there was this huge population growth.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Okay. So he said, you know, during this period, to think about it, in a little town, in a little village you might have had so many Giovanni's, all these John's. This is when they of course added these names to distinguish all the people. So really, last names sort of exploded in popularity in the Middle Ages because of the population growth.
Speaker 2:Esatto, quindi, per questo motivo si dovette aggiungere è vero, rick. Quindi, addenditi, they had to add on. Esatto, aggiungere un altro nome oltre al nome di battesimo per identificare la persona.
Speaker 3:Had to add on another name other than your given name at baptism, basically your first name to identify all these people.
Speaker 2:And so here comes the best part. Here's the best part. For us linguistics enthusiasts, let's derive this second name from four different sources.
Speaker 3:Ok, so you can really trace the origin of all these second names, which became last names, from four different things.
Speaker 2:So now I'll tell you all four together, and then we'll talk about them one at a time. Four different things, quindi adesso ve li dico tutti e quattro insieme, e poi ne parliamo uno alla volta.
Speaker 3:Okay, so he's going to tell us those four things now, and then he'll talk about each one.
Speaker 2:Okay, il primo è il patronimico o il matronimico.
Speaker 3:So the first one is basically the name that you got from a mother or a father, right?
Speaker 2:Il secondo è il toponimo. Rick sai, il toponimo è il nome di un luogo.
Speaker 3:Okay, so then there's the toponico, which I'm not sure how to say that exactly in English, but it's a place name.
Speaker 2:So a geographical origin. Bravo, Terzo il mestiere svolto dalla persona.
Speaker 3:Third would be like a profession or a job title Okay. The fourth would be just a nickname, so some sort of adjective about that person.
