Let’s go back in time a couple of decades. High school German class. There was an Italian foreign exchange student to snickered whenever the name Knut (the K is pronounced, of course) was said. He said it sounds like a rude Italian word, but he never said what it was.
Any ideas?
Educated guess based on a Spanish cognate: coño is from Latin cunnus.
Given the series of sound changes between the various Romance languages, I’d expect cunnus to come into Italian either as cunno or maybe cunnu.
Knut, with the T dropped or spoken softly could be stretched into cunnu without breaking.
ETA: I Googled and found this Wikipedia article which says that cunnu, from cunnus, exists in Sardinian, which is one of many Italian languages.