Hi, Fraggle, Would you tell us why so many Italian surnames end with English vowels? "O" and "I" seem to be very common.
If you go to an Italian website and scan the text, you'll find that the vast majority of Italian words end in vowels. Names simply follow the phonetic structure of the language. The prepositions in ("in") and per ("for"), the adverb non ("no, not"), the conjunction ed ("and," a form of e before a word beginning with a vowel), the masculine definite article il ("the") and its compounds del, nel, etc., are among the very few common Italian words ending in consonants that come to mind. I can also think of the word lapis ("pencil"), and there are surely a handful of others. Spanish and Portuguese are other Romance languages in which most words end in vowels, although not as disproporionately as Italian. In Spanish a word can end in D, L, N, R, S or Z, and one word (reloj = "clock") ends in J. Words ending in other consonants are taken from the Native American languages or are modern foreign borrowings. Latin was more generous with consonantal endings, but words like sub ("under"), hoc ("there"), sed ("but") and sum ("am") were truncated (or discarded) in the evolution to the modern Romance languages. Modern French, Catalan and Romanian have many words ending in consonants, but rather than being direct inheritances from Latin, these naked consonants are the result of a final vowel being chopped off.
