Luporini/o

[NickiMacaroni]

Hi! I have a question about surnames. One of the names in my family is either Luporini or Luporino. It seems to be spelled differently on different documents. I also have the last name Castelli, but I've seen it spelled in some places as Castello. Is it common for "i" and "o" to be interchangeable? Or is it just a common typo because the I and o are next to each other on the keyboard? Thanks!
- Nicki

[adelfio]

Luporini is found in Capannori

Marty

[sunniedays]

I'm a beginner as far as Italian genealogy goes but I have been studying the Italian language for a few years and I thought it may be helpful for you to know this particular grammatical concept in Italian. Italian has gender for it's nouns (and other parts of speech), masculine and feminine. Every rule has exceptions but for these purposes, masculine singular nouns end in -o (and sometimes -e). To make a masculine singular noun plural you drop the last vowel, -0, and add an -i. (Feminine nouns generally end in -a and change to an -e in the plural.) So it makes grammatical sense to see words go from ending in -o to ending in -i. Why they would do it to a name, is for someone else to explain. Maybe it's someone's own opinion as to what the name should end in.

[PippoM]

Changing from -o to -i and the contrary may depend on various reasons:

- people were usually illiterate, so they didn't even know how to spell their surname;
- it might happen that one member was called, for instance "Rosso", and members of the family as a whole "Rossi"; so, it was up to the writer of the documents how to write the surname of one of them
- what seems to us to be a plural, might have originally been a latin genitive (Luporini=son of Luporino) that was once used in a document and then became a surname

and many more that are certainly known to experts, but I just don't know, or don't come to my mind...