Is there any significance to Italian last names beginning with de, del, or della (“of,” “of the”)? Do they indicate nobility? Someone told me that della is the highest rank. –Thomas Della Fave, Irving, Texas
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Don’t get your hopes up, your lordship. Once in a while de, della, and the like mean the family was, if not noble, at least a cut above the common herd. But more often the prefix is merely the equivalent of the Irish Mac or O, the English suffix -son (e.g., Johnson), or the Norman-French Fitz–that is, it indicates descent, e.g., de Stefano, “son of Steven.” Or it may indicate place of origin, as in del Corso, “dweller near the highway.” Roughly the same holds true of French and Spanish names. I’ve been told that if the initial D is capitalized it signifies noble origin, but knowing how much immigrant names got scrambled en route to the New World I wouldn’t place too much faith in this.
The situation is clearer with German names. The prefix von means “of” and was originally appended to all sorts of names, most of them pretty humble; but at some point over the centuries von came to mean that the family had been ennobled–or at least they’d like you to think so. For example, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, from the West German city of Aachen, was originally Ludwig Mies; he added the rest (Rohe was his mom’s maiden name) to give himself a little more status when pitching impressionable clients. Quoth a biographer: “He would not have dared to assume a designation of real German nobility, like ‘von,’ but ‘van der’ was permissible; it sounded faintly elegant to the German ear though it was common enough to the Dutch.”
Just to continue the investigation of what word processor algorithms do with Roman numerals, I put Microsoft Word to the test:
