Ponzi (W3)
(E?)(L?) https://web.archive.org/web/20160731191354/http://billcasselman.com/unpub_two/ponzi.htm
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The Surname Ponzi
Like many ancient surnames, there are several cogent origins of "Ponzi". "Ponzi" is an Italian patronymic surname. That means the founding ancestor of the family bore the name "Ponzio" or "Ponzo". "Ponzi" is a plural form so that, as Italian surnames were created in the late middle ages, one might have seen "Pietro Ponzi", meaning "Peter, son of Ponzo" or "Peter of the Ponzo family".
"Ponzio" is an earlier personal name derived from an ancient Roman family name, "Pontius". It was not common early in Italian naming because of its negative association, in a Roman Catholic country, with one of the great villains in the Christian myths, "Pontius Pilate". "Pontius Pilatus" was the official judge at the trial of Christ and Pilate it was who ordered Jesus to be crucified. "Pontius" is known to historical record as the Prefect of the Roman province of Judaea from 26 to 36 CE.
When Pilate presented the scourged Christ to the hostile mob of louts in front of the praetorium, his residence in Jerusalem, during that long-ago Passover, the Bible claims that Pontius' most famous words were uttered, the Latin sentence "Ecce homo!" There are several translations. The gist of the Latin is "Here is the guy you want." A literal translation might be "Behold the man!"
Of course, Pilate's sentence ("Ecce homo!") is a translation into Latin in Saint Jerome's Vulgate version of the bible. In the Koine Greek of the original New Testament, Pilate's words to the screaming crowd are reported as "idou ho anthropos"). The gist of the Greek is "See. Here is this person. He is merely a human being."
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Four Alternate Origins of the Italian Surname "Ponzi"
1. The Roman family name "Pontius" appears later in Italian history as "Pontii", a patronymic plural. One northern Italian pronunciation of "Pontii" is "pontzi" or "ponzi".
2. Some European surnames began as nicknames of ancestors who acted so frequently in various religious dramas, often taking the same part, that they became identified with it. It is possible that the founding ancestor of the "Ponzi" family may, especially if the surname arose late in Italian history, have been an amateur actor who played "Pontius Pilate" in crucifixion dramas. Eventually his nickname became his new surname. That transition of nickname to surname is exceedingly common in the rise of European last names.
3. "Pontius" may have arisen as a Roman version of a foreign name, perhaps the name of an immigrant to Rome. The family founder may have come to Italy from "Pontus" in Asia Minor, named "Pontos" in Greek after their word "pontos" = "sea". In antiquity the Greek "pontos" comprised the southern shore of the Black Sea, today part of Turkey. "Pontos" was dubbed by ancient Greek colonists who took the name from their term for the Black Sea, "Pontos Euxeinos", "hospitable sea". The territory on the south coast is first mentioned as "Pontos" in "The Anabasis" by the Greek historian Xenophon. The compound adjective "euxeinos" consists of "eu-" Greek "good", "well" + "xeinos" Ionian Greek "stranger", "foreigner" so that one who was hospitable was "good to strangers".
From a similar Attic Greek adjective and noun "xenos" comes our modern English word "xenophobia" = "fear of strangers". When in 1898 British scientist Sir William Ramsay isolated gaseous elements new to the periodic table he named one of them "the strange one" or "xenon".
4. The least likely origin, from a strict linguistic standpoint, is "Ponzi" as an alternate pronunciation of "Bonzi", a northern Italian surname, itself a plural and patronymic of a Piedmontese medieval personal name, "Bónizo", of Germanic origin.
Unlikely, but remember, in the history of human naming, almost anything is possible.
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Erstellt: 2024-04