Even if you are just getting familiar with the Hungarian language, you most probably know by now that Hungarians have their names backwards compared to the majority of the world. So we have the family name first, than the given names. In my case I was born as Borbély Ágnes .
But did you ever notice the weirdness of a woman’s married name? Nowadays in the modern world we have of course a lot of different options, when we choose what our married name is going to be, but the old-school traditional way is to take the husbands surname and make it into a Mrs, right? But that is not so easy to recognize to foreign people on a Hungarian name. Why? As oppose to just sticking the “Mrs” in English or “Frau” in German in front of the name, we put “né” at the end of that family name. Even trickier is to determine a persons gender by their names, if that woman has chosen to take the most outdated version and instead of adding the “né” at the end of the family name, they are using the husbands full name completely, adding the “né” at the very end and deleting the existence of their original name with a swing of the pen for good. So if the husband is called Kovács János, the wife is Kovács Jánosné. Funny, isn’t it?
My mom use to hate her own name for some reason, so she was more than happy to go for this most old-school variation. Her choice. Me? I belong to those very few, who love their names and didn’t want to get rid of it. But I also love my husband, so not to take his surname would’ve made me feel weird As I said, there are a lot of options available, so if he was Hungarian, it wouldn’t have been such a hard choice to make. Not in my case, because his English, but my married name has to be chosen according to Hungarian rules, therefore my easy option of just calling myself Clapham Borbély Ágnes, which would’ve worked both for Hungarians and Brittish people is unfortunately ruled out. I either have to stick a hyphen in-between our names or add the “né” somehow. I even considered to to submit a special request to add this option to the already existing ones, but I realized that might be too much hassle. After a hell of a lot of thinking and countless sleepless nights I came to a conclusion. English people will just have to accept, that Claphamné translates to Mrs. Clapham.