Talk:List of Magyarized geographical names

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I believe this is a spurious article. All nationalities have their equivalent name for cities, towns, geographical features, etc. Why single out 'magyarized' names? Certainly the non-Magyar nationalities of the Kingdom of Hungary would always have referred to these and other places in their own language, regardless of what the official name was. Hunor-Koppany 00:57, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

After reading this article I have decided to remove its contents, mainly on the grounds that it contains uncited references. Wikipedia exists primarily as a factual reference base, and not despite what some may think as a kind of quasi gazetteer. To fulfill its purpose to its readers, Wiki articles need to be contributing to the overall body of knowledge in much the same way as would a published encyclopedia. The article presented here looks suspiciously like some sort of personal memoir, diary entry etc. It may well be authentic but this is beside the point, it does not allow the neutral or casual reader extract a proven and undeniable portion reality and as such it cannot be seen to meet the requirements of Wikipedia. If articles such as this continue to be allowed to flourish then this forum will eventually be little more than a widely read site where anybody can compose, vilify and generally share their thoughts about anything, safe in the knowledge that will influence potentially many many people in cyberspace. Whilst Wiki provides a discussion page for this very purpose, allowing these sorts of scribbling in the article section would take Wiki too far from its itended function.

You obviously do not understand the meaning of the term "Magyarized names". It do not refer to "equivalent names that Hungarians use for cities", but to names that originally were non-Hungarian and that had no any meaning in Hungarian language but were forcibly "translated" into Hungarian as part of agressive Magyarization policy in the 19th century. This have nothing to do with names of some other places for which original Hungarian names existed before Magyarization. PANONIAN (talk) 16:33, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Please don't try and guess what I don't understand Panonian. Any ruling government in any nation on earth always has and always will exercise its right to deciding on placenames. To single out the Kingdom of Hungary (if I'm not mistaken it was the legal and recognised government in these areas at the time) for this, and to decide that it was part of "aggressive Magyarization policy" is just your (and no doubt many others') opinion. Governments choosing an official name that takes into consideration other ethnic groups living there is only a relatively recent phenomenon, in line with the trend of countries with ethnic minorities making attempts to ameliorate their troubled pasts. If you care to, you may have difficulty finding examples of government policy (of any nation) that did otherwise in the 19th century. Hunor-Koppany 00:48, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, but even claim that Hungarian government from the time was "legal and recognised government" is highly disputed because we can discuss much about legality of the government that was not supported by the majority of citizens (remember that most inhabitants of the Kingdom of Hungary were non-Hungarians). Also the claim that "other ethnic groups living there is only a relatively recent phenomenon" is false becauce Slavs, Germanic peoples and Vlachs lived there even before Hungarians arrived in the 9th century, not to mention that in the early Medieval times of the Kingdom of Hungary, the Slavs were majority in this country. PANONIAN (talk) 10:17, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

this artice is something to LOL about

Excuse me Panonian, but I believe you haven't understood my point. It is undeniable that the legal and recognised government of the time was the Kingdom of Hungary, yet you say this is highly disputed; I'm not sure on what basis. The fact there were other nationalities in the Kingdom who sought autonomy and independence from the Kingdom doesn't change that status for the period in question. You also seem to have completely misunderstood what I meant by different ethnicities living in a shared area; I was not making a point about who was there first. I was simply pointing out the obvious that it is the prerogative of a ruling government to decide official names, in an official language. At that time, and in that place, that language happened to be Hungarian. Certainly the German and Slavic nationalities would have had and used their own names, but officially the names were Hungarian. This is not an astonishing phenomenon, and hardly evidence for Magyarization of placenames. I reiterate my opinion again that it is only in today's 'enlightened' times that governments do make attempts to take steps, albeit in varying degrees depending on where you are, to make accommodations for ethnicities of varying languages. This article seems to be an attempt to apply these 'modern' ideals, in retrospect, to very different ones that prevailed in the 19th century. Hunor-Koppany 03:41, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

It's so clear that this pathetic article was created by a hungarophobic romanian, slovak or serb... Magyarized names?!? The MAGYAR names were the first names of those settlements!! Examples: Cserépalja - this has meaning in Hungarian. Czrepaja - what does this mean in Serbian??? It's clear that Serbs adopted the name by its sounding.. Just like Temesvár --> "Timisoara". What the f.ck does "oara" mean in romanian??! NOTHING. and Idvor?!?? what tha hell.. UDVAR DOES HAVE MAGYAR MEANING. The names of settlements have not been "magyarized" but serbianized, romanianized and slovakianized. You wanna tell us Magyars that the division of peoples in the Carpathian basin was the same as it is today?? And we just conquered those territories from the serbs, romanians and slovaks?? pathetic, get yourselves a f.ckin historical map, a REAL one, not a falsified. why would we "magyarize" names that were Magyar originally?? woo-hoo the evil bad Hungarians..

Strong words, weak arguments. These words you mention have meaning in all slavic languaces. Czrepaja - crep - shard; Idvor - dvor - yard;

When Magyars came to Europe, they were not very technologically advanced in the fields of agriculture and manufacturing. Therefore, they took many words from slavic languages - simply because there were no equivalent words in the magyar language. It its similar to the situation today - languages take words from english, simply because there are no national words, e.g. software, hardware.

147.175.98.213 (talk) 10:01, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Btw. Did you know, that 20% of hungarian words are of Slavic origin? (Citation here: A nyelv és a nyelvek ("Language and languages"), edited by István Kenesei. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 2004, ISBN 963-05-7959-6, p. 134)

Cserepalja may mean something in Hungarian (bottom of the pot) but I think this had a different meaning in the early beginning. For example, Oroshaza was Uroshaza=Orvoshaza ("settlement for doctors"); Oroszkut(=Russian well) in Transylvania was in the past "Uroskut", meaning "source/well of doctors" (as there were never any Russians there!). Regarding the list above, pls cite the exact documentation. I could give you a counter-example, in Slovakia, Bős was renamed to Gabcikovo (100% Hungarian village) in 1920, "Liptoszentmiklos" became "Liptovsky Mikulas" in 1946 and lots of other towns were Slovakised in even 1960! One other thing, Visegrad could come from Slavic (=High Castle) or from Hungarian (Vizi Gradics=water castle)[don't tell me Gradics is from Slavic, it is from opposite!)

Regarding the origin of Hungarian language, if someone is telling you there are lot of "loanwords" it is not true as these words have strong interconnections to other words, so there will be a change of paradigm on the Hungarian language soon. At the moment if the scientist is not biased by politics and looking only at the facts then he should say WE DON'T KNOW about the origin of Hungarian (I suppose we can say for SLAVIC too!). One (maybe two) examples: UROS=VAROS in Romanian means city, VAR+OS means "with castle" in Hungarian, we use it in term "city". The name HOUSE/HAUSE/HIZA deriving from Latin, was borrowed from Hungarian HÁZ, this can be prooved by the fact that we use -HOZ/-HEZ at the end of the words as "-by" "-at" meaning "at his/her place"; HOZZÁ (=to him/her); HAZA(=Motherland, homeland) which is a root/base of the language, cannot be a borrowed word (in Latin doesnt mean anything). To add, Hungarian didn't modify itself so much; I can read easily scripts from 12th century (can you read Shakespeare?).

To conclude, this article is a joke if you don't write documentation on which day it was modified. I should write a similar one on Slovakised villages/towns ... Abdulka (talk) 12:19, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, article is certainly not a "joke". Adoption of names and words for sure was inter-linguistic and nobody denies that local Indo-European languages also borrowed some Hungarian words or names. This article, however, speaks about non-Hungarian names that were Magyarized and it is valid historical and linguistic subject to be presented in Wikipedia. For sure, we can discuss origin of each name mentioned in this article whose status you might see as problematic. PANONIAN 08:12, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

FROM THOMAS IONESCU

THIS PAGE IS POLITICAL INCORRECT!!! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.92.247.86 (talk) 01:25, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

Criteria for deletion

As has been stated before, this article has numerous problems yet it still remains, hence the deletion criteria tags applied:

- POV forking: Most (if not all) of these placenames have their own article, where its name in other languages appears (or should). If it doesn't, then that article is where the name in other languages should be included, not in a separate list. Why the need to have an article that just repeats this information? Hardly encyclopedic, and contrary to Wikipedia's general avoidance of lists for list's sake. The obvious conclusion is that this list is an attempt to further a particular POV.

- Overcategorisation: As above. Wikipedia could potentially contain myriads of such articles. For example, Anglicised placenames in Ireland, Germanised placenames in Poland, "Swedishised" placenames in Finland... the ridiculousness could be never-ending, but fortunately common sense prevails sometimes, and therefore they don't exist. (Additionally each one could have it's opposite article). Again, hardly encyclopedic.

- Original research: Your contention Panonian that these names are "Magyarised" is not irrefutable, hence it is more than likely that your insistence on doing so is a POV that you are attempting to push. When populations are multilingual, it is inevitable and natural that each will have their own versions of placenames, but for you this seems to be "Magyarization". It just happens to be that in that period of time the Hungarian name was official because they were part of the Kingdom of Hungary; hardly a controversial or unique policy for any government. Whether or not Hungarians were in the minority or not is totally irrevelant and is not the issue here, Hungarian was the official language. Additionally, the source provided in the article is merely a helységnév-azonosító szótár; in English, a dictionary of placenames. Such a source certainly does not provide evidence of a place name being "Magyarised". Hunor-Koppany (talk) 21:50, 11 October 2011 (UTC)

As a Hungarian user I disagree with the proposed deletion. Lists are useful if they collect data according to a set criteria for example villages in the High Alps or towns founded by the Romans. During the last decades of the 19th century the Hungarian government standardized place names and changed many which they thought foreign-sounding. The new names were invented by government officials. These process was more or less the same what the Italians did in South Tyrol or the Germans in Silesia (or to be correct the Slovaks in Southern Slovakia!). Here we don't have to discuss the whole policy implications of these changes only to collect them in a list. As far as I see the article should be about a special topic of historical toponymy not politics. Everybody who is fluent in Hungarian immediately recognises that a name was "Magyarized" or not. The "dictionary of placenames" is the best scientific collection of historical toponyms in the Kingdom of Hungary which is certainly most useful to expand the article. The book shows all the changes in official place names but it would be better to get some information about the exact dates of the changes (dates are missing in the dictionary). Zello (talk) 15:59, 12 October 2011 (UTC)