Johan Combrink, "Du Pisani se stam van Venesiaan af" - Italian progenitors among Afrikaans speakers
published article (onomastics) · consulted 2026-07-29
- Type
- published article (onomastics)
- Repository
- press column, Stigting vir Afrikaans, Stellenbosch
- Reference
- undated column; author Johan Combrink
- Consulted
- 2026-07-29
The citation as it was given
Supplied by An Afrikaans linguist writing on the Italian stamvaders. INDEPENDENT OF EVERYTHING ELSE WE HOLD, and it corroborates two separate findings and corrects a third. (1) ALVISO = LOUIS. Combrink: "Alviso, wat aan die Kaap so onbekend was dat dit na Louis (lewies) verander is" - the name was so unfamiliar at the Cape that it was changed to Louis. That resolves the two Pisanis in the 1786 register as ONE MAN. (2) MARINCOWITZ CONFIRMED ITALIAN: "Marincowitz, Girolemo, geb. 1805" is listed among the 19th-century Italian stamvaders, which corroborates our Trieste finding from a wholly different direction. (3) ETYMOLOGY: Almero comes via Italian from Germanic athala "adel" + mar/mer "vermaard" - roughly "famous for his nobility"; the English cognates are Elmar, Elmer and Aylmer. Alviso is likewise Germanic, about "al-wys", cognate with Aloisius. (4) The surname PISANI also gave Afrikaans DU PISANI. (5) Combrink traces Almero out of the (Du) Pisani family into ROUX (1822), GREY (1865) and BOTES (c.1921), and notes it among Pretorius, Smuts and De Villiers - BUT NOT THE OOSTHUIZENS, and ours starts in 1786, thirty-six years before his earliest. See PER-000001.
Kept verbatim. This project contradicts published genealogies and corrects a family's own oral tradition, so every claim has to be checkable by someone who was not in the room.
What rests on this source
Farms
People
- Ockert Almero Oosthuizen 24 April 1786 – 26 February 1859
- Ger(H)olm Marincowitz 11 February 1805 – 13 May 1890
- Alviso Louis Almoro Pisani about 1767
- Dina Johanna Crafford about 1771 – 1846