Let's take a short walk through the Transylvanian countryside (a.k.a. Village list, though not all of the following have been included in the real thing !)
We start off at:
How about a tongue twister - repeat 3
times:
KASTENDORF
KASTENHOLZ
KATZENDORF
One of the few regular "declensions" (if the term can be applied to place
names) is the pair:
COPSA MARE and COPSA MICA (in Rum)
NAGYKAPUS and
KISKAPUS (its Hung. equivalent)
GROSSKOPISCH and KLEIN KOPISCH (in
German)
Translation: Large and Small Kapus where Kapus = gate in
Hungarian
Although for most KLEIN/KIS-whatever, there's usually a GROSS/NAGY-whatever close by, since the latter often don't find it necessary to proclaim their "GROSS-ness", they eliminate the beginning syllable.
oh - you're looking for FINTINELE ? which one ? since there are 7
ditto
for LUNCA
but LUNCA + a descriptor ?? - !only! 18.......
Is it necessary to know the correct spelling ? Absolutely ! (so please check
your sources carefully)
Was the ancestor born in JOHANNESDORF or in
JOHANNISDORF ? (for which the Rumanian in both cases is SINTIOANA)
In
KRATSCHENDORF or in KROTSCHENDORF?
In MATTERSDORF or in
METTERSDORF?
There's also MESCHENDORF, not to be mistaken for MESCHEN (though
the latter is not much larger than a DORF)
a PESCHENDORF and PUSCHENDORF
a
PETERSDORF and RETERSDORF
And having mentioned PETERSDORF......here's a - short - list of possibilities
(Rumanian equivalents):
PETIS
PETRIS
PETRESTI
PETRESTII
and
PIETRIS
all to be found several times of course.
There's REUSSEN, REUSSMARKT, REUSSDORF, and REUSSDOERFCHEN (a Klein [or Gross] REUSSDOERFCHEN might also exist - I just haven't found it yet)
SANKT GOTTHARD is (also) in Switzerland and many's the time on seeing SALZBURG, I (immediately and erroneously!) thought of Mozart, i.e. Austria.
And don't forget the difference a hyphen can make:
SUB-PADURE and
SUBPADURE
as well as SUB-CETATE and SUBCETATE
KUKULLODOMBO (apparently the home of a well-known Hungarian church choir), whose musical effect is heightened with the insertion of the proper diacritics, is what I felt like at the end.
- as did whoever (apparently) ran out of names and 15 km from GERSA I founded GERSA II.
All this in an area only slightly larger than New Brunswick and almost identical in size to South Carolina.
By the way, this list was compiled without the benefit (?) of the "Ortsnamenbuch" (gazetteer of Transylvanian placenames) which would probably have added at least another 5 possibilities to each of the above.
Afterthought 1: Many Transylvanian villages also have their dialectal
variants.
Afterthought 2: Of interest to Banat researchers - there's also a
Glogovatz and a Kalocsa