Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-31763506-20171130021854/@comment-29984007-20171201002932

DukeLeto7 wrote: 1) It's my understanding that a lot of European surnames based around placenames originiated to identify a progenitor who originally came from somewhare other than where they were now living.  So in this case, Ronnie James' distant patronymic ancestor would have moved to Abruzzo from Padova, and his friends would call him "Johnny the Paduan" or Giovanni Padovano, and the surname would be inherited.

2) As to the vowel transposition, that sort of thing is depressingly common with American family names originating with the Catholic immigrant wave of the late 19th century.  It means that the immigrating family was only partially literate and the Yankee immigration/census officials changed the Italian spelling to gibberish on the official documents.

3) I kind of did appreciate that Firenze was originally Florentia, but it strikes me as odd that we Englsih (and apparently French) speakers feel entitled to correct the people who actually live there on the spelling of their home.

1) in italian is more common put a "da" before the name of the city ('da' is litteraly 'from') example leonardo da vinci (vinci is a town near Florence)

2) and the family immigrating come from the poor of the original country (the land from the james grandparent still to day one of the most poor italian region)

3) italian is a strange language. i can take a book write in "volgare" (literaly vernacular) from 1200/1300 and read without any help, and after the unification wars (1870) the 'high' italian language is pointed to the works of that poets (petrarca, boccaccio and dante), so the italian city name come down from "fiorenza"