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ARMBARRING TECHNIQUES: Lifting the lid on Hungarian baby naming.I've been finding out about naming babies. This all started a few weeks ago when Anna, my heavily pregnant driver, told me that she had picked her baby's name from a list. I was curious and since then have slowly pieced together this story.
In Hungary, there is a goverment issued list of boys and girls names from which parents must name their child. I assume that this list is quite long, and mistily recall Anna telling me that it was actually a book.
This means that parents don't have the freedom to call their baby anything they want - 'King Kong', for example. Unless 'King Kong' is on the list. If you want to give your baby an outlandish name, you have to apply to the goverment for permission. Which has some interesting implications - the government has the power to reject baby names and what's more, somebody has the job of sifting through applications and assessing whether the baby's name is GOOD! or BAD! It also suggests that if you don't know about the list, you might excitedly rock up to the office, ready to register your newborn baby as 'King Kong', then get turned away.
And, let's say you forgot to register your baby immediately, it is feasible that you could have been illegally calling your kid 'King Kong' for a couple of weeks. Assuming, once again, that 'King Kong' is not on the list.
There is an exception to this rule. Apparently, if you are foreign, and you are naming your own baby, you can do what you want. Moving away from the name 'King Kong' for a second, it means that I could call my kid 'Gareth' and get away with it, whereas a Hungarian might not.
One more thing, the list doesn't have anything to do with religion, and most definitely comes from the goverment.
Well, I hope I haven't fucked any of this up - I certainly want to avoid getting this website's huge Hungarian readership on my back.
posted by andrew taylor at 12:04 PM
3 Comments:
Interesting!
Do you think a person who's got an outlandish name will spend a hard life?
We have a similar system in Japan.
You can't use some of Chinese characters for a person's name.
Actually, when I was born,my parents didn't check the list and chose inappropriate one for my name!The office rejected it,so they had to choose another one.
I think somebody should work for checking newborn baby's names as long as careless parents,like mine,exist.
I think somebody who has an outlandish name will probably have a hard time at school, certainly.
Misako isn't really an outlandish name though, is it? Was the spelling just outlandish?
It's just about spelling.
Each 'Kanji'has different meaning and different atmosphere,so spelling is a bit important when you name a baby in Japan.
The list of 'Kanji'for person's name is renewed sometime.The character my parents wanted to use is on the list now.So the original spelling was not so outlandish,I believe,it's just not on the list.
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