Changing Names: Onomastic Remarks on Hungarian-Americans

Pulitzer Prizes are probably as American today as apple pie, yet Jos~P~ Pulitzer, or Pulitzer J6zsef, was born in the Hungarian town of Mak6, JU s ·can about 100 miles southeast of Budapest. Some of the Hungarian-A.Inefl )a who made their names famous in the United States include film actor J3eie Lugosi, film director George Cukor, composer Bela Bartok, comedian Erii el Kovacs, football player Joe Namath, and physicist Edward Teller. COI~Jl!l ki. :r.,egJO' Michael Kovats de Fabricy (1724-1779), Commandant of the Pulas . ·s~ sacrificed his life defending Charleston, South Carolina, against the Bfltl forces on May 11, 1779. )d Today an investigation of changing names during the Early RepubliC woUld only be possible on the basis of written sources. Such an investigation ~0:111 certainly miss several important factors because a great deal of pe:tJII iiiB information can only be obtained through oral interviews. By invesuga~eir the contemporary processes of how Hungarian immigrants change t nd names in America, I hope to show some of the linguistic, sociological •. 8 as psychological factcrs that were probably relevant in the Early RepubhC welJ.l f 1111 "The name-stock of any language includes potentially the names 0 we other languages", says Algeo (1982:536), and he goes on to say tbat wit~ normal procedure for languages is "to accept the foreign name as a loan IJOf' whatever phonological, orthographical and grammatical adaptations the tller rowing language requires". American English, perhaps more than anY 0 rneS· language, is characterized by a tremendous variety of foreign personal na btl Some scanty remarks on the Americanization of Hungarian names caJI 11o found in Mencken (1948), Fabhin (1948), and McRobbie (1979). To date,