Cecil’s classic column today reminds me of something I’ve been idly wondering about for a while. The names Ng and Nguyen are very common; I’m curious what they literally signify in Vietnamese (Ng is also Vietnamese, right?) If the answer is “nothing,” whence do they derive? Is one derived from the other?
Actually, Ng is Cantonese. “Ng” actually means “five”. Really. It’s also a word associated with the old imperial military: depending on the era it has been used to refer to a particular rank, or a unit.
I know “ng” is a Vietnamese word but I don’t know if it’s used as a name.
It’s unrelated to Nguyen, which is broken up in two syllables: “ngu” and “yen”. I don’t know Vietnamese but the Nguyen Dynasty (1802-1945) is written with characters that mean respectively, in Chinese, nothing and “morning”. The first character is listed as “person’s name”. I think you’ll need someone who actually knows Vietnamese to help you out further with that one.
I’ve always wondered though: since these Asian languages use pictures instead of letters, how did the name Ng end up without any vowels when it was translated to English? I mean, it’s pronounced “ning” so why didn’t the first guy who came over to America just spell it “Ning”?
Because it’s not pronounced “ning”, though it might sound that way to a non-native listener. Some east-Asian languages, such as Vietnamese, Cantonese and to some extent Japanese have a sounds that are a lot like “n” but act like vowels. You need to differenciate “n” from “ni”, which are two completely different sounds.
Sorry but I realised that I messed up in my first post. “Nguyen” is written with a single character. I was going to mention that “morning” was also used to mean “dynasty” when it dawned on me that the second character wasn’t part of the name. That was a stupid, stupid mistake. I should be ashamed.
:smack:
I found a decent cite for Nguyen: here it is.
I quote:
One humorous comment, one question. Comment: I work at IBM, and at one point had a meeting with a man named Nguyen, I didn’t catch his first name. After the meeting, I figured I’d just put Nguyen in the name database and find out who this dude was. Imagine my surprise when about 3,000 names popped up! :eek: I had no idea Nguyen was basically Smith in another country.
Question: what is the right way to pronounce Nguyen?
Honestly, it depends on the person. Growing up near Little Saigon in California, I had a lot of Vietnamese friends and classmates. The closest approximation I can figure out in writing is “nwin” with the first n being almost silent.
However, lots of other Vietnamese pronounce it noo-yen. Best way to find out is to just ask the person.
The Cantonese name “Ng” is properly pronounced as written. There is no vowel. It’s not “ning”, “Ing”, “Ink”, or anything else like that unless a person with that name has slightly anglicised it for you (because there have been many threads on this, and everyone seems to know an “Ng” who pronounces it this particular way, or that particular way). In Hong Kong, it’s just “Ng”. It’s not hard to say. The sound is present in English and other Western languages. We say it every day. We just aren’t used to saying it alone or to start a word. Say “smiling” without the “smili…” part, and you’ve got it. Might take a little practice.
“Ng” is a Chinese name, and the Vietnamese equivalent is Ngo.
Nguyen is unrelated. “Nwin”, as previously given, is acceptable for an English speaker.
We learned in my Conversational Cantonese class that you can say the word “sing” and just hold the note - you’re doing it! You’re basically closing the throat with the back of your tongue and making a nasal sound.
If it helps, “ng” was chosen to anglicize that sound because that’s how we spell it in English. But it has neither an “n” sound or a “g” sound, which is what baffles English speakers. It’s almost like a formless nasal sound, if that makes any sense.
My Vietnamese friend says the best way to approximate Nguyen if you don’t want to learn the real way is to just say “when.” And if somebody’s name is Ing or Eng, it’s really just Ng and the family has added the vowel to help out hapless Westerners.
Alternately, if you’re a fan of They Might Be Giants, just sing Ana Ng without the “Ana” part. 
[nitpick] if ng is ‘吴’ then it’s not ‘five’. [/nitpick]
It must be the square of five.
You’re right, of course. If it’s written with that character, it’s the name of a kingdom from the famous Three Kingdoms era. In Mandarin, it’s pronounced Wu. The other two kingdoms were Wei and Shu.
clenches his muscles in frustration
Your point that Chinese writing doesn’t directly represent the sound of the word is the central one to your question, and you got an answer. So I’m just going to chime in to point a couple things out. Most Asian languages do not use Chinese characters, at least not anymore. Vietnamese, historically, has been written with Chinese characters, and later with their own that were derived from the Chinese, but it doen’t anymore; it uses the Roman alphabet (with a few added letters and lots of diacritics) and is pretty solidly phonetic. Korean, too, uses a phonetic alphabet, but it’s one of their own invention. Japanese mixes Chinese characters with kana, which again are phonetic (but the difficulty of interpreting the Chinese characters more than makes up for the nice simple kana - the Chinese characters can each be read in more than one way; they correspond to multiple Japanese words. And two characters combined may indicate a word that’s separate from either of the component characters.)
And no form of writing uses pictures. Even Egyptian hieroglyphics, which clearly look like pictures, were refined into a phonetic system. The Chinese characters, though, refer to words alone. Some of the characters are essentially based on pictures (generally ones referring to common concrete objects), but even then they’ve been refined and simplified until they often are not very representative at all of what they’re depicting. And some characters are ideograms, which means they reflect an idea (one example being the character for two, which is two horizontal lines.) But most don’t physically reflect the word they’re describing in the slightest - they are not pictures at all, just complex symbols that refer to different words. You can tell that characters refer to words because each one only reflects a specific word; if you drew a picture of a person, it could be read as any of the words that refer to people. But the Chinese character usually translated as person can only be read as one specific word, and other words that mean some type of person are written with their own character. It really is just a complicated system in which each word has its own symbol. The symbols are not completely arbitrary, but many of them bear no obvious connection to what they’re representing. Most Chinese characters bear no more resemblance to the meaning of the word they represent than the letters “person” resemble a person.
(Sorry if this doesn’t make much sense. I’m really, really tired.)
It’s not really formless, it’s just that English speakers have a tough time recognizing the sound for what it is. If you try to make a “d” sound with your nasal passages you’ll get an “n” sound; “ng” is just the nasalized equivalent of “g”. It’s formed in the same spot in the mouth that “k” and “g” are.
yup, i just wanted to point out that ‘five’ is not used as a surname. 
on preview: i see that the OP did not specify surnames. i had assumed since i have not seen ‘Ng’ used outside of surnames before.
Well, this will come as quite a surprise to Mrs. Edmond and Willy Ng.
Also, for those who want to know a bit more about the surname Ng, I found this.
you are right, of course. it’s even listed under the ‘bai jia xing’. ^^’