Talk:Kovács (surname)

Renaming
This should be renamed Kovács, I guess. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Slovan (talk • contribs) 09:52, 9 October 2006 (UTC).

Merge proposal

 * Support merge into Kovacs and move this article to Kovács (or merge the edit histories, if some admin wants to take that on). Kovacs is the older article, but a majority of the name-holders listed use the accented form. -- JHunterJ 12:15, 14 October 2006 (UTC)JHunterJ 12:11, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Support. Yury Petrachenko (talk) 04:18, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Linguistic Mistake
The article states that the name Kovacs "is cognate to the English name Smith." This is a misuse of the word "cognate". There is a loose definition and a strict definition of "cognate", and the use here is incorrect under both.

The loose, informal definition is that two words are cognate if they are similar in sound and meaning. "Kovacz" is not similar in sound to "Smith".

The strict definition used by a historical linguist is that two words in different languages are cognate if they are inherited directly from the same form in a language which is ancestral to both languages (e.g. English "father" and Latin "pater" are cognate because these words are inherited from the same Indo-European word). Note that inheritance is not the same a borrowing. Given that English and Hungarian are not demonstrably related, word pairs in English and Hungarian cannot be cognate, by defintion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.6.25.117 (talk) 14:11, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Kohanim?
Why is this page in the category Category:People_of_Kohanim_descent? Is the name of Jewish origin? Rojomoke (talk) 13:18, 29 August 2009 (UTC)