what do people who read his name as the stallion of the prophetmuhammed think??

I don't know about any Hungarian meaning of "barak", but "karter" is Polish for the crankcase of a car engine. And I remember the time when Jimmy Carter replaced Gerald Ford, whose last name meant a whole car .

It did provide punsters with some food for thought, but had little influence on our perception of either politician.

Cheers, Leszek.

Smile......the name Barack, as in Obama, means peach or apricot.....should cause some laughter in Hungary.

Strange. I have always imagined Hungary as a warm and fertile country, very rich in all sorts of fruit. Why would their language have the same word for peach and apricot?

Funny, but I don't think that Hungarians have jokes about this name - it's because of the pronuncation: "barack" in Hungarian is pronounced with an "divided" c-k

And why do Hungarians have the same word for "apricot" and "peach"?
1. It's not totally correct: apricot = sárgabarack, peach = öszibarack
2. Both fruits are "relatives".

Btw, "Baracke" in German means "wooden hut", sometimes a hut in very bad condition. During the Nazi dictatorship this word had a horrible meaning because the houses in the Concentration Camps were called "Baracken".

The meaning is not restricted to this gruesome context. In English, the accomodation for soldiers is commonly known as "the barracks". Wasn't this the original meaning in German too, prior to the Nazi era?

On a lighter note, there is a lovely Italian expression "piantare baracca e buratini" - "to drop, or abandon, the shed and the puppets" - describing a hasty and disorderly retreat of someone who suddenly got into more trouble than he expected. The underlying funny image is that of a small self-employed performing artist (think of the traditional English Punch-and-Judy show) getting scared of something and running for his life, disrupting his show and scattering his props all over the park.

Cheers,
Leszek.

It had a similar meaning, not only accomodation for soldiers (that's "Kaserne"). The German word "Baracke" is more a neutral word, meaning "wooden hut". For example, at the university where I studied were some old wooden buildings we also had lectures in - those also were called "Baracken".