Hungarian boy names
Hungary is surrounded by Slavic and Germanic neighbours and speaks a language related to none of them. Hungarian is Uralic — its nearest large relatives are Finnish and Estonian, two thousand kilometres away, and its closest relatives of all are Khanty and Mansi in western Siberia. It is not Slavic and not Indo-European, and the oldest names here come from the chieftains who rode into the Carpathian basin in the 890s. None of them is in the current U.S. top 100.
Conquest-era names
The honfoglalás, the taking of the homeland, happened around 895, and Hungary has never stopped naming children after it. Some of these are Old Turkic, picked up on the steppe; some are plain Hungarian words; several belong to men who appear only in chronicles written three centuries later, which is a caveat worth keeping.
- ÁrpádAHR-pahdHungarian
From árpa, barley. Árpád led the seven Magyar tribes into the Carpathian basin, and his descendants ruled Hungary for four hundred years.
- AttilaOT-til-lawHungarian
Traditionally little father, from Gothic atta with a diminutive. Whether the Huns and the Magyars are related is doubtful; the name is ordinary in Hungary regardless, and Attila József is its greatest modern poet.
- HunorHOO-norHungarian
The hunter who chased the wondrous stag. In the origin legend he and his brother Magor follow the stag westward and father the Huns and the Magyars.
- BendegúzBEN-deh-goozHungarian
Attila's father in the Hungarian chronicles. A legend's name, pulled back into use by the nineteenth-century national revival.
- CsabaCHAW-bawHungarian
Traditionally glossed shepherd, or gift; the etymology is unsettled. In legend, Attila's son, who leads the Székely home along the Milky Way.
- LeventeLEH-ven-tehHungarian
Being, existing, from the Old Hungarian stem lëv-, to be. An eleventh-century prince who refused baptism.
- BotondBO-tondHungarian
From bot, a mace or club — roughly, the one with the mace. The chronicles have him splitting the gate of Constantinople with an axe.
- LehelLEH-helHungarian
The chieftain of the horn, hanged after the Magyar defeat at Lechfeld in 955. The horn itself is still in a museum at Jászberény.
- SzabolcsSAH-bolchHungarian
A conquest-era chieftain, an earthwork fort on the Tisza, and a county still on the map. The sz is a plain s and the cs is ch.
- ZoltánZOL-tahnHungarian
A ruler's title worn as a name — the same Turkic word that gave English sultan. Árpád's son, and the composer Zoltán Kodály.
- GyulaDYOO-lawHungarian
A chieftain's rank that hardened into a name, and Hungary's stand-in for Julius. The gy is one palatal sound, close to the d in during.
- CsongorCHON-gorHungarian
An Old Turkic word for a falcon, and the hero of Vörösmarty's verse play Csongor és Tünde.
- ÁkosAH-kohshHungarian
Traditionally read as white falcon, off the old roll of Magyar clans. Two syllables, and the s is sh.
- FarkasFOR-koshHungarian
Simply the Hungarian word for wolf. Farkas Bolyai was the mathematician father of János Bolyai, who broke Euclid's fifth postulate against his father's advice.
Kings and saints
Hungary became a Christian kingdom in the year 1000, and the names of the men who did it are still given to Hungarian boys — including the pagan one that the first king was born with.
- VajkVOYKHungarian
The pagan birth name of Hungary's first Christian king, discarded at baptism. One syllable, and about as old as Hungarian names get.
- IstvánISHT-vahnHungarian
The Hungarian Stephen, Greek for crown. Crowned in 1000, canonised in 1083, and the reason 20 August is Hungary's national day.
- GézaGAY-zawHungarian
A princely title turned personal name, from Old Hungarian gyeucsa. Géza was István's father, and began the conversion his son completed.
- LászlóLAHS-lohHungarian
The Slavic compound Vladislav, Magyarised past recognition. St László was the knight-king, and the name has been in the Hungarian top ranks for nine centuries.
- BélaBAY-lawHungarian
Disputed — a royal name whose etymology has never been settled. Four kings, plus Béla Bartók, who walked the villages recording folk songs onto wax cylinders by the thousand.
- KálmánKAHL-mahnHungarian
King Coloman the Learned, who around 1100 legislated that witches do not exist and therefore are not to be investigated.
- ImreIM-rehHungarian
The Hungarian Emeric, from a Germanic name. Prince Imre, István's heir, died in a hunting accident; the Italian form of the same name, Amerigo, is why two continents are called America.
European names in Hungarian dress
The church calendar reached Hungary like everywhere else and came out sounding different. Stress the first syllable of each and the accents will take care of themselves.
- BenceBEN-tsehHungarian
The short form of Benedek, Benedict, long since a full name. For years running it has been one of the two commonest names given in Hungary.
- MátéMAH-tayHungarian
The Hungarian Matthew, Hebrew for gift of Yahweh. The accents mark long vowels, not stress.
- GáborGAH-borHungarian
The Hungarian Gabriel, Hebrew for God is my strength. Gábor Bethlen ruled Transylvania in its golden age.
- MiklósMIK-lohshHungarian
The Hungarian Nicholas, victory of the people. The poet Miklós Radnóti's last poems were found in his coat pocket in a mass grave.
- SándorSHAHN-dorHungarian
The Hungarian Alexander. Sándor Petőfi read the poem that started the 1848 revolution aloud in Pest and vanished on a battlefield at 26.
- BalázsBAH-lahzhHungarian
The Hungarian Blaise, the saint invoked for illnesses of the throat. The zs is the j in French jour.
How Hungarian naming works
Hungarians put the family name first. The composer is Bartók Béla at home and Béla Bartók abroad, and Hungarian newspapers reverse foreign names to match, so an American president appears as Lincoln Ábrahám. The language behind that habit works unlike its neighbours in almost every respect: it is agglutinative, stacking suffix on suffix where English uses prepositions, and it has no grammatical gender at all — one pronoun, ő, covers he and she, which Hungarians learning English find as strange as English speakers find the eighteen noun cases. The relationship to Finnish is real but very old and visible mainly in the basic vocabulary: Hungarian hal against Finnish kala for fish, kéz against käsi for hand, víz against vesi for water. Nobody can hold a conversation across it.
The spelling is regular once four digraphs are learned, and they are the four that trip everyone: cs is ch, sz is s, plain s is sh, and gy is a single palatal sound made with the tongue flat against the roof of the mouth, roughly the d in during. So Csaba is CHAW-baw and Gyula is DYOO-law. Accents mark vowel length, never stress; stress is always on the first syllable. One more thing worth knowing before choosing: Hungary keeps an official register of given names, maintained by the Research Institute for Linguistics, and a name outside it has to be approved before a registrar will enter it. The list runs to thousands of entries, so the constraint bites rarely, but it is the reason the Hungarian stock has stayed as distinct as it has.