18th-century family names of Győr and Kapuvár

Abstract

18th-century family names of Győr and Kapuvár

The author compares the 18th-century family names of Győr and those of Kapuvár, two Transdanubian settlements. In fact, family names of four distinct types of settlements are examined in the paper, since 18th-century inhabitants of Győr living outside and inside the town walls were clearly separated and on the site of today’s Kapuvár there were at that time two settlements: the market town of Kapuvár and the village of Garta. Differences in social, ethnic and other factors are well reflected in the name stock. The frequency of names, the percentages of the ten most frequent names, the results of the examination of name origins all mirror an altering, increasing population. The fact that many Hungarian surnames occur only once in the name stock and that there are many German and Slavic family names in the corpus suggest that there must have been significant movements of population in both towns, as a result of which name frequency is relatively low in both cases. Semantic analysis shows that in the observed period the most frequent family names in Győr were those derived from place-names, whilst in Kapuvár surnames derived from names of occupations formed the most typical family names.