Benkő Loránd - Imre Samu (szerk.): The Hungarian language (Budapest, 1972)
Loránd Benkő: Hungarian proper names
tive function was adequately fulfilled by the official qualitative attributes put before the earlier given name of the place. The attributes were usually names of rivers, counties or major landscape units: Földvár : > Tiszaföldvár, Szentgyörgy : > Zalaszentgyörgy, Bogdány : > Nyírbogdány, Böszörmény : > Hajdúböszörmény, etc. In this manner, new, or more accurately, half-new, community names have been formed by the hundreds. Administrative unification of communities has also often given rise to an arbitrary change of place names. The “new” name was usually derived from the combination of the names of the two localities that were united. This is how the current name of the Hungarian capital was formed from the name of Buda situated on the right, and of Pest situated on the left side of the Danube. At the beginning and during the middle of the last century the variant in the reverse was preferred: Pestbuda. Similar formations are: Adásztevel (Adász and Tevel), Celldömölk (Cell and Dömölk), etc. 3. Another major field where artificial name-giving came to prevail strongly has been that of the street and square names. Here, however, not partially new but completely new methods have been developed. One of the reasons why new official names had to be given is to be sought in the growing requirement of rapidly expanding settlements with their everincreasing number of squares and streets calling for names. Another reason has been a similarly increasing tendency to honour famous and respectable persons by naming streets and squares after them. Arbitrary names of streets and squares have brought new features into the system of Hungarian geographical terminology in that the personal names whose stock had been left unexploited by earlier practices began to claim an increasing role in the nomenclature. Such names as the following have been introduced: Petőfi tér, Kossuth Lajos tér, Vörösmarty utca, Arany János utca, József Attila utca, etc. Nevertheless, there are various drawbacks in indulging in this new type of name-giving. First, the vogue of naming streets and squares after persons has gradually pushed all other ways of name-giving into the background, thus reducing this class of names to an indifferent, stereotyped pattern. Secondly, many a beautiful old name, valuable also sometimes from the point of view of cultural history, has been replaced by this forced practice of re-naming the streets and squares after famous persons. Precisely on account of this vogue of stereotype names it has become highly exigent to take administrative measures with a view toward ensuring sufficient protection for traditional geographical denominations. 251