Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 452

Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 452

This report is available at http://www.s-gabriel.org/452

Some of the Academy's early reports contain errors that we haven't yet corrected. Please use it with caution.

Greetings,

Here's the information we can give you about your late-period Transylvanian name, "Bathory."

"Bathory" is a Magyar (Hungarian) name derived from "Bátor," a place in northeastern Hungary. Magyar was one of the most common langugages in Transylvania, so it's reasonable to have a Transylvanian persona who is Hungarian.

"Bathory" is pronounced something like "BAW-tor-y" and we found many spellings from your period.

We put together a list of 16th-century women's names. The first group of names are common names, with the most popular names first; the second list are less common names. Names in parantheses are variant forms. In all of these, a slash indicates an accent and a colon indicates an umlaut (for example, "y:" is a "y" with an umlaut--two dots--over it).

There are very few records of women's names before this time. The only 15th-century women's names we recorded are Anna, Barbara, Katherina, and Margaretha. However, we are fairly sure that names from the 16th century would be appropriate for your persona as well.

In modern Magyar the family name is put first, so that a typical name would be "Bathory Anna." In period this wasn't always done--we suspect that Latin documents put the names in the usual order and that Magyar documents put them in the reversed order.

Walraven van Nijmege, Talan Gwynek, and Arval Benicouer contributed to this letter.

We hope this has been helpful, and that we can continue to assist you.

In service,
Alan Fairfax
Academy of S. Gabriel