Interesting case of double-layered false nominative determinism. Although foresta in Italian means "forest" and thus the surname would seem eminently plant-based, it actually means "foreigner", which I guess he also ended up being as Italian immigrant in the US. The etymology of forest and foreigner is closely related and means basically just "(from the) outside".
Wow, that's a really sneaky "false friend" in Italian! Especially since it even has the meaning of "forest-related" in other Latinic languages, e.g. in French route forestière = forest road.
I wouldn't call it so much a false friend as forest/foreign (and forfeit and I'm sure a bunch of other words) all coming from the same Latin "foris" root and being semantically related.
In Italian, outside is just "fuori".
You're a foreigner to what you've forfeited in the forest.
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Interesting case of double-layered false nominative determinism. Although foresta in Italian means "forest" and thus the surname would seem eminently plant-based, it actually means "foreigner", which I guess he also ended up being as Italian immigrant in the US. The etymology of forest and foreigner is closely related and means basically just "(from the) outside".
Wow, that's a really sneaky "false friend" in Italian! Especially since it even has the meaning of "forest-related" in other Latinic languages, e.g. in French route forestière = forest road.
I wouldn't call it so much a false friend as forest/foreign (and forfeit and I'm sure a bunch of other words) all coming from the same Latin "foris" root and being semantically related.
In Italian, outside is just "fuori".
You're a foreigner to what you've forfeited in the forest.
Forest-related is "forestale" in Italian.
In Portuguese "forasteiro" can also be used to mean "foreigner" or "outsider".