Több keresztnév választása a 18. században Újvárosban

Absztrakt

Giving more than one Christian name in the 18th-century Újváros (Győr, Hungary)

In the 18th century, giving more than a single Christian name to a child was an exceptional phenomenon in communities of Hungarian native speakers. The practice of choosing two Christian names was not widespread until the middle of the 19th century in Hungary. The fashion of giving two or three Christian names, however, became more and more popular as early as the first decades of the 1700s in territories of the country where German immigrants lived. In the 18th century, in the settlement called Újváros, today a district of the Transdanubian town of Győr, many German-speaking inhabitants lived; most belonged to the Evangelical Church and fewer of them were Catholics. Among these people the German practice of giving more than one Christian name was thriving up to the end of the 18th century, when it abruptly ended. Characteristics of this tradition can easily be observed if time (its peak was in the 1740s and 1750s), gender (it was more common in the case of female names) and denomination (it was typical in the Evangelical Church) are involved. The practice of choosing more than one Christian name was primarily motivated by the parents’ nationalities: surnames and other relevant data suggest that this tradition was fostered by the German-speaking inhabitants of Újváros. They brought this practice with them from Germany: in their new homeland, next to an ordinary Hungarian first name (e.g. János ‘John’, Mária ‘Mary’, Anna ‘Anne’) they tended to choose a German or a more fashionable Hungarian Christian name. This tradition, however, faded away after a few generations.