Lovino's name and its possible origins.

[monkeychin.livejournal.com]

This is a little information about the origin of Lovino's name I found on hetaliaita (this post)

I translated it literally some months ago (in author's view), since I thought it would be better (I mean, in this way it's easier understand, right?)
Anyway I hope it'll be useful and at least it may clear up this stressful "dilemma" (please tell me if I did some mistakes, thank you.)

"At first I had been based solely on Italian sites and the only reference I found was about Lovinus, a variant of the latin word for “little wolf", used in the past as city’s name in its neutral variant “Lovinum" or as nickname in its male variant “Lovinus". […]

(She says that someone pointed out that in English there are some people named Lovino/a, which are English variants of the Italian names Lavinio/Lavinia, which are Etruscan.)

For those who don’t know, Lavinia was Aeneas’s wife, so, if you believe in the myth, ancestor of Romulus, Caesar and Augustus. Hence, I believe, English sites give to this name the meaning of “Mother of the Romans". Ours, technically more correct, just said that “Comes from Lavinium/Lavinia" because most likely it was the meaning that Latins gave to it. Unfortunately the Etruscan meaning is lost, but I doubt that it meant “Mother of the Romans".

Currently Lavinio and Lavinia exist as names, but are not much used. The variants Lovino/Lovina, at the moment, aren’t used in Italy either (it’s possible they never existed and are just foreign versions of the name, for instance Marco who becomes Mark…) At the most, we have Lavino and Lavina, which I’ve never heard, who still seem to exist (among other things, it seems that in English Lovino/Lovina are pronunced, more or less, like Lavino/Lavina).

The likely explanation is that Himaruya, surely, checked out a not-italian dictionary of names which refers to Lovino as a name, seeing the Etruscan origin and meaning of it, has mistaken it for an italian one and used it for Romano."

Comments

[anubismito]

Interesting :D Thanks for the info.
While I can tell that in my country (Argentina) Lovino is used as surname, not a given name.
and it derived from Italy. So, I guess that they can use it as surname too... Even though it's not common at all O,o

[monkeychin.livejournal.com]

From what I know, here too. They said Lovino is used as surname especially in the south part of Italy (Bari).
Here (http://www.significato.eu/cognome/LOVINO) says that the surname Lovino has two origins: the first, from the northern, derive from Lovo, ancient variant or dialectal word for "lupo" (wolf): it was a common costum use animal words, besides, in the Germanic mythology the wolf was a precious animal, indeed it was common gave the name "wolf" among germanic people.
Instead, for the southern, Lovino derive from the word "vino" (wine), to specify or forefathers's profession or a nickname form an habit of them. This guess would be confirm since there are many families named Vino around Bari, so Lovino can ba a variant of "Vino": the prefix "Lo", in this case used as an article "Il" (in Italy "the wine" is "Il vino" not "lo vino"), is pretty common in southern's people surnames, and it's pretty common join articles and nouns together like Lorusso, Logatto, Lorizza, Lobello etc.

[anubismito]

Thank you for the info and link!! :D

[monkeychin.livejournal.com]

you're welcome C:

[crayonfishy.livejournal.com]

How interesting!

I think a similar phenomenon happened with Hungary's human name, Elisaveta/Elisabeta, which I heard isn't actually a Hungarian name xD.

[jesstheusagi.livejournal.com]

This is very interesting!
Another thing to note is (as far as I know) Himaruya introduced the human names using katakana rather than our alphabet, so translators had to guess a bit at pronunciation, meaning the 'more correct' ones could have been the intended reading/spelling. (I've also heard that this may mean Finland's name actually is the more common "Timo," but I don't remember where I heard those particular ideas or their credibility.)

[lildeadkitty.livejournal.com]

That's interesting to read.

Apparently Rovino means I ruin (or soemthing similar) in Italian so there's another theory that that's where Hima got Lovino's name from. Because Hima only wrote their names in kana it's hard to tell whether he meant for it to be spelt as Rovino or Lovino though.

http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/0/Lovina (http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/0/Lovina) according to this name site, Lovina's a variant of Lavinia so it could be that Hima used Lovino as a male version of Lovina.

[monkeychin.livejournal.com]

Yes, in Italian Rovino means I ruin, though I don't think Hima might thought to use this name, since it's a verb and not a noun... (although Lovino destroys everything when does chores.)

Lavinia is quite used in Italy, Lavinio not much.

Well there are a lot of guesses about Lovino's name. Feliciano is a male name, but I've never heard about it, normally all names based on "felicità" (happiness) are Felice.

Anyway the only official thing we know is that Himaruya used non-common Italian names for Italy's brothers. Honestly I like them, it's true they're unusual, but I'm used to them by now...

[boo-sagara.livejournal.com]

I thought Feliciano was a reasonably common name in Italy because here (Brazil) it's not so hard to find people with that name, especially for people with Italian descent and it's also the name of our awful chairman of Human Rights and Minorities uuuurgh =o!

My mom had a boss named Romano (also an Italian descent) years ago, but it's not a common name nowadays.

Now, Lovino I definitely never had heard before Hetalia, but I like how it sounds and I think this kind of discussion about the origins of that name is really cool!

[monkeychin.livejournal.com]

My mom has a coworker whose surname's Romano. Veneziano is also a surname. They're bot quite used since in Italy is common having surnames related to cities or regions etc. (My surname, for istance, is Calabrese who means dweller of the Calabria region.) and ironically my dad's born there.

[jjblue1.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've heard of that theory but it doesn't make any sense he would go and give him a verb as a name. He didn't do it for any of the other characters. He maybe mispelled their names but they're all names.

As written in the post it's likely what he did, although neither Lovino or Lovina are Italian variants of the name. They're only English variants.

[webcomix.livejournal.com]

The only thing I can really add to the conversation is that I have met two different RL people named Lavina, although neither of them were Italian (Chinese in both cases, actually...)

[lildeadkitty.livejournal.com]

That's not a very chinese sounding name...
Is it actually a Chinese name or were they give a non Chinese name?

My dad knows a Chinese guy called Billy (he's from China but moved to England when he was a kid so his dad had his name changed to Billy since Billy's a pretty common name here).

[webcomix.livejournal.com]

I live in Hong Kong, so many people have both a Chinese and an English name. My English name is also Latin in origin, come to think of it =3=

But considering this, perhaps it's another example of Asians tweaking names from other languages...but who knows! Variants slowly become names in their own right over time, anyway.

[wakalakaosaka.livejournal.com]

Super interesting, I really love discussions like this!

Just want to add to the conversation a bit, I have only seen Feliciano as a surname a couple of times in the States but not in Italy when I stayed there. I've met Italians with super common names, though I have seen the name Lavinia a couple of times

[jjblue1.livejournal.com]

Feliciano is a name in Italy (there's even a saint named as such and one of the Garibaldini was also named like that) but it's one that's falling out of use in fact there are many Italians who had never heard of it. As of now it's more common 'Felice', even though this one too is considered an 'old' name and not that much used.
The meaning is the same (happy) but Himaruya probably didn't know Feliciano was falling out of use and chose it instead than Felice. Interesting enough he chose for both the Italies names that end with 'no', same as their 'nation names', Romano and Veneziano (which are terribly unfitting as well as Rome isn't in south Italy and Venice remained independent for most of its history... Better names would have been Milanese and Napoletano).

[mystofthestars.livejournal.com]

Ricordavo il post nell'altra community, ahah. In effetti ero cascata dall'albero quando l'avevo letto, non ci sarei mai arrivata altrimenti.
Per me comunque rimarrà per sempre un mistero il come Himaruya sia riuscito, per entrambi i fratelli italiani, a scegliere due nomi praticamente inutilizzati da noi XD con tutti i Luca, Francesco e Stefano che abbiamo...

[monkeychin.livejournal.com]

Credo sia uno di quei misteri irrisolvibili... Sinceramente anch'io me lo sono chiesto. Dopotutto ha chiamato Spagna Antonio... Che è un nome utilizzatissimo qui! Mi pare davvero strano, ma come ho già detto ormai mi ci sono affezionata a questi due nomi. Nonostante di Italiano abbiano ben poco xD

Bé almeno non gli ha dato nomi strani tipo Arcibaldo o che ne so Sempronio xD

[jjblue1.livejournal.com]

LOL Beh almeno però la gente avrebbe saputo che erano italiani. Ricordo che nei primi tempi i fan italiani neanche lo sapevano che Feliciano era un nome italiano...

Io al suo posto avrei utilizzato Italo come nome. Non mi piace ma per uno che rappresenta l'Italia era molto adatto. Anche Romano sarebbe stato meglio se lo avesse usato come nome proprio invece che come 'nome di nazione'... visto che Roma con la storia del sud Italia non c'entra niente... ma si è scelto anche Veneziano per il nord, quando la chibitalia che lui rappresenta con Venezia ha ben poco in comune (solo la battaglia con Turchia, per il resto è tutta storia, completamente travisata e distorta, del ducato di Milano)

[jjblue1.livejournal.com]

Credo che quando Himaruya li abbia scelti non solo non conosceva un accidente dell'Italia (pensa anche al cognome, Vargas, con tutti i cognomi di gente famosa che abbiamo qui ne va a prendere uno che sì, da qualche parte in Italia si usa ma pochissimo e comunque, storicamente parlando, non c'entra niente... ma non è sorprendente visto che storicamente parlando non sapeva niente dell'Italia a parte che avevamo il Rinascimento... Manierismo, Barocco, Neoclassicismo, futurismo, la pittura metafisica, il movimento del Novecento, l'arte povera nonché tutte le variazioni di altri movimenti che abbiamo fatto qui e che sono uniche di qui tipo il romanico pisano e via non esistono...) per cui ha scelto i nomi in base al significato.

Feliciano per che è sempre felice e Lovino perché nella sua idea il sud Italia inizia a Roma... che non solo è nel centro ma con il regno del sud proprio non c'entra niente... e quindi madre/padre dei romani andava bene...

[monkeychin.livejournal.com]

Bé in un certo senso non possiamo biasimarlo, dopotutto lui non ha di certo studiato la nostra storia, si è solo limitato a cercare alcune curiosità sul nostro Paese. Devo ammettere però, che nonostante tutto ha fatto un bel lavoro, tralasciando qualche inaccuratezza è davvero carina l'idea di rappresentare le nazioni e la storia in versione antropomorfa, ma comunque senza rendere la "lettura" pesante. Dopotutto la storia è un ripetersi di sbagli, guerre, invenzioni e tanto altro. Per quanto sia triste che l'accuratezza dei nomi non sia stata approfondita, non mi lamento. Sono semplici nomi, sicuramente inventati all'ultimo momento, poiché non credo che a Himaruya interessasse molto dare un "nome" ai sui personaggi essendo rappresentazioni di nazioni. Saranno state le fangirl ha costringerlo a sceglierne uno, credo.

[jjblue1.livejournal.com]

LOL, so someone found my old post, uh?
I think I've posted it here as well back in the past but no one was much interested... it's nice to see things are changed!

[monkeychin.livejournal.com]

Ho pensato fosse carino condividere l'idea con gli altri, dato che secondo me è molto probabile come "intuizione".
Forse quando lo hai postato non erano molto interessati, è un peccato perché secondo me è davvero molto interessante!
Dopotutto tengo molto ai fratelli Italia, poiché oltre a rappresentarla sono anche molto carini. Insomma voglio dire, sono iper-patriottica e non posso non amarli!
Anch'io son contenta di vedere che in molti si sono interessati C:

[jjblue1.livejournal.com]

Mi fa piacere che tu l'abbia trovata abbastanza interessante da condividerla!
Anch'io tengo molto a quei due, oramai più che un hobby sono un lavoro a tempo pieno anche se non posto più su LJ per via della mancanza di interesse che avevo riscontrato. Ora sto cercando di 'invadere' Deviantart... :P

[roberta della casa (from livejournal.com)]

Well, as an Italyan from South Italy I assume that Lovino may actually come from a male version of the name Lavinia (Lovinio, which may have been mistaken for Lovino during the translation from Japanese), name of Enea's wife, daughter of king Latino (which also is the italian word for the lenguage latin), and that it was chosen becouse the author called the character Romano (even if Rome is in the Central Italy and has nothing in common with the South ) and went for that name which somehow was connected with the story of the city. In my opinion Himaruya choose those ancient names becouse he tought that giving a modern name to the brothers wouldn't fit well: in the past a completely different kind of names were popular in our land compared to the ones which are populare in modern Italy and for this reason giving an ancient name to a hundreds-year-old Country makes more sense, I guess…