I was told by a hungarian, that hungarian written spelling and spoken pronunciation is pretty precisely aligned compared to, say, english. Except when it comes to names when it gets a bit random!
Why not do the bloke the decency to spell his name correctly? Those diacritics are important.
Anyway, I was told that Paul's name is very roughly pronounced by an anglophone as: "airdish".
A theorem both deep and profound States that every circle is round But in a paper by Erdos Written in Kurdish A counterexample is found
EDIT: Oh and Erdős was the great collaborator. There is an Erdős number (Bacon and Ozzie too) which defines how close you are to him. eg if you co-authored a paper with Erdős you have a Erdős number of one. If you co-auth a paper with someone with an Erdős number of one, then you have an Erdős number of two etc.
I think that the Bacon (Kevin Bacon) number was the original and there is also a Black Sabbath number which is related to Ozzie (MHRiP).
I also gather that a very few people have managed a minimum measure of all three numbers. Feynman might be one of them (its too late to check).
The only weird ones I can think of are the ones that end in -y. For example, Görgey. They're meant to be -i endings. They signify a noble lineage (or at least used to).
I guess "ch" might also show up every now and then too (it's just "cs", just like "ch" in English). For example, Széchényi.
Since this is a compsci forum to some extent, maybe I should also mention that the so-called Lanczos-interpolation is "actually" Lánczos. Took even me a while to pick up on that one! Thinking about it, I now see that it features a "cz", another letter (digraph) that is longer part of the alphabet.
Also note that Paul is a "translated" name. His actual name was Pál Erdős. He got lucky with that one, it's an easy swap. Edward Teller (Ede Teller) was the same way, and so was John (von) Neumann (János Neumann).
As a bonus trivia, the Hungarian name order is big endian, like the Japanese. So it would be "Erdős Pál", "Teller Ede", "Neumann János", and "Lánczos Kornél". Though just like with Japanese, I would not recommend trying to adhere to this order in most English speaking contexts.
> Except when it comes to names when it gets a bit random!
The letters "gy", "ty", and "ly" are not exclusive to names, nor are they significantly more common in names.
It's not that I disagree people would struggle with these, just that it's not unique to names, so it couldn't have been what they were referring to there.
> The only weird ones I can think of are the ones that end in -y. For example, Görgey. They're meant to be -i endings.
is not actually surprising to an English speaker.
In general, if the source language has a latin alphabet, we try to stick to the original spelling in most cases, but it is not uncommon to replace non-Hungarian letters with the closest one. It's a bit more complicated in case of non-latin alphabets, especially Cyrillic due to a lot of shared history.