Search Etymological origin of Italian surnames

BUONI | BUONO

Good, very rare, typical of Tuscany, Good is widespread in Umbria and throughout the south, deriving from the medieval name Buonus derived in turn from the Latin nomen Bonus, we have an example in a letter to the podestà of Pistoia of 1432, where it is reads: "... Doni et Buonus Niccolai Buoni de Businis ...". additions provided by Stefano Ferrazzi As rightly said, the origin of these surnames is to be found in the nickname or medieval name Buono, which, in archaic onomastics, assumes a clear auspicious value (see Bona). In this context, however, it should be noted that the surname Buono does not always have an Italian origin, at least not in the strict sense: some of these families, in fact, are of ancient origin arbëreshë, while others have a distant Jewish descent. In the arbëreshë case, first of all, it seems that Buono translates either the Albanian mirë or the Greek kalòs, which, in their respective languages, means good (in ancient Greek, to tell the truth, the adjective kalòs had different nuances, ranging from the concept of goodness and the concept of beauty): between the two hypotheses, in fact, the most probable is that of an arvanite origin (Greek-Albanian), if one also thinks of the diffusion of the surname Calò in southern Italy (see Calò ). Turning now to the Jewish source, it should be noted that here we must distinguish between at least three origins, depending on the different geographical origin. If the surname originated in Italy, in fact, it is likely that these families have simply adopted an Italian surname, based on national onomastics: this is a very frequent phenomenon in Jewish-Italian surnames, which, in many cases, is easily confuse with purely Italian surnames (at least, in a linguistic sense). Alternatively, however, it is also possible that the good Jewish-Italians have foreign origins, partly Ashkenazi and partly Sephardic: in the first case, Buono would be born from a translation of the German surname Gut, which, together with the Guth variant, literally means good (this surname, in fact, also presents a Hebrew source, in this case Ashkenazi); in the second case, instead, Good would derive from an adaptation of the Spanish surname Bueno, of obvious meaning (Bueno, in this sense, is also a Hebrew surname, specifically Sephardic).

Bibliographic source' "L'origine dei cognomi Italianim storia ed etimologia" di E. Rossoni disponibile online su: https://archive.org/

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