Names in the Clouds

Here’s a fun picture from my genealogy blog. I just love word clouds. Word clouds in shapes – even better!

Édes-Orbán Family

Have you ever seen a tree in the clouds? Or a cloud of names in a tree?

A friend posted a link to a list of the most popular Hungarian surnames (2006). In the top spot is Nagy, the ‘Smiths’ of Hungary. Although, to be accurate,while Smith is the most common English language surname in Hungarian it translates to Kovács, which ranks #2 in Hungarian popularity.

In our direct ancestry line these surnames were ranked in the top 100;

Nagy #1     Tóth #3     Kis #7     Mólnar #8

Pintér#28     Vőrős #62     Orbán #82

This tree word-cloud shows all the known surnames in our direct line.

And that’s the Big (Nagy)  and Small (Kis) of it.

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Kellemes Húsvéti Ünnepeket !

Easter Monday sprinkling is an old Hungarian custom. Young men would sprinkle cologne or water on the ladies of their fancy, often extended to all the women in the house. Mother told of a Canadian boyfriend who upon hearing of the tradition showed up at their house and woke the family at the crack of dawn on Easter Monday with a bottle of perfume to be the first to sprinkle her. A sweet gesture not much appreciated by her tired parents. 

Apparently some communities take it quite a bit further, drenching the girls with buckets of water.

from sulekha.com

Legeslegmegengesztelhetetlenebbeknek

Fiume Harbor about 1900

Hungarian has been described as the most difficult language to learn.  That might be an exaggeration, but, the agglutinative (little bits of words all stuck together) nature of the Magyar tongue can be daunting. For a while under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Adriatic port city of Fiume was a free state managed by a Hungarian governor. The Hungarians required anyone wanting a position in the government to learn Hungarian. Most of those interested were Italian speakers who found the requirement impossible.

They expressed their opinion in this word scribbled on the walls: ‘Legeslegmegengesztelhetetlenebbeknek’. It means ‘To the most unreasonable ones’. And, no. I’ve tried. I can’t pronounce it.