Here’s a question that has bothered me since high school: Why do certain last names (I think exclusively Asian ones) have English spellings without vowels? For example, Ng. I’m sure that those names have a particular pronounciation in the country of origin, but why did either the immigrant or the immigration clerk think it was appropriate to transliterate the name without vowels?
Good question! :: Flipping through phonebook looking for Anna Ng ::
My WAG would be that the translation was actually made in the country of origin, not here.
they are not transliterations. the nerve of those immigrants keeping their own names and not adopting names that other cultures can understand
Primaflora, I am quite sure your post is a joke but I just don’t get it.
At any rate, I think the point of the OP is “how the heck do you pronounce NG??”
I would add my curiosity: how do you pronounce it?
I had a friend with that last name. We pronounced it “Ing”. On the other hand, my violin instructor’s husband had the surname “Ngyuen”, and she told us it was okay to pronounce it “Win”. In both cases, I’m fairly sure that the way we were pronouncing them was not how the names are supposed to be pronounced.
curwin, it’s not exclusively Asian last names that don’t have vowels. I think it was sk8rtrix’s Pit thread that complained about people mispronouncing his vowel-less name, Cyr. Also, the majority of Asian last names do have vowels. Mine, for example, has seven letters, which includes more vowels than consonants, and one double vowel combination.
As for how they got the spelling of their names, my guess is that someone bilingual was able to translate the names to an English-language phonetic spelling equivalent.
One of my first questions on this board was how to pronounce the Vietnamese surname “Ng” and I was advised to pronounce it as “Ang” or “Eng” depending on the bearer of the name.
Several years ago I read (I might be a bit wrong on the exact title) How We Lost the Vietnam War by Nguyen Cao Ky (remember him?) and the book included a little note that said to pronounce the ‘Ng’ part of his name with an ‘h’ sound, rendering something like ‘wheyun’ as opposed to the ‘win’ that Audrey mentioned. I note she includes “Ing” as an interpretation of Ng.
Audrey may be righter than rain; I merely offer what I’ve picked up.
I knew a dude from Slovenia whose last name was Skrlj. As far as I know, I’m the only American who ever learned how to pronounce it correctly. (According to him).
I’m not telling.
Since when is Poland east of the Urals? My dad once mentioned the day in grade school that the teacher said that every syllable must have a vowel. For some reason, his friend Joe Krz* couldn’t get it.
*pronounced “Kirch”; I could be wrong about the last letter.
Another one forya: I had a teacher named Mr. Ngai. Everyone pronounced it “Nai”, as if the “g” wasn’t there at all. Contrast that with another friend’s surname: Nagai, which is pronounced “na-guy”. ::head spins::
For Nguyen, I’ve also heard “Nu-yen”. Sounds like fresh Japanese currency to me. 
Anyway, I suspect it’s one of the most frequently mispronounced Asian names.
Well, the world series of poker announcers referred to 1998(?) champion Scottie Nguyen as “Gwynn” (kinda).
Paul Dickson reported this in his book Names:
In 1983 Pepsi had a promotional game where you collected letters printed on the inside of flip tops. The idea was to collect all the letters in your last name and then redeem them for $5 a letter. To avoid having to pay out a lot of money, Pepsi severely restricted the availability of vowels. That worked for most people, but a Richard Vlk of Pittsburgh managed to find almost 1400 sets of his name and collected over $20,000.
I’m not sure exactly where the name Vlk comes from but it’s probably a Slavic name, perhaps Czech or Slovenian.
A friend of mine is learning Bulgarian. Some of the words start with three or four consonants in a row… :eek:
As for “Nguyen”, isn’t it pronounced with an initial “ng” sound?
Rigardu, kaj vi ekvidos.
http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/profiles/profv01.htm
The above website indicates that,
Sounds to me like the spellings we are discussing are transliterations. Even if they are not transliterations, they are literations (perhaps peformed by people with no knowledge of chu nom), but I think that is pretty much the same thing for the purposes of curwin’s question.
My answer to that question is: I have no idea. Lots of literations, trans- or not, are going to seem odd to anglophones. I would argue that this is not necessarily because the word in question originates in a language which is very different from English; it can also be because the people who set the standards for putting the language in Roman characters were not thinking in English, they were thinking in French or Portugese or whatever. So we’re dealing with two different potentials sources of confusion.
In any case, the link I gave talks a little more about the standards the missionaries used to carry Vietnames words and sounds into Roman orthography.
The Ng that I know locally pronounces it “ing”. However, according to some pronunciation guides I’ve seen, it should sound like “MMMM”.
On the other hand, I still haven’t quite gotten the right pronunciation for “Nguyen” according to one local family. It sounds like a combination of several of the previous posts, actually.
Kind of [sup]N[/sup]Gwaiyen, but slurred together fast enough that it almost sounds like “win” if you don’t listen closely. At the very least, it’s got some sounds that aren’t common to English speakers so they’re hard to hear.
I suspect most Asians give up on trying to get us to say it correctly & just answer to whatever comes close.
IIRC, “Nguyen” is not a transliteration, because the Vietnamese have used a version of the Latin alphabet for a long time. “Ng”, however, is a Pinyan transliteration from Cantonese.
Thank you redtail! In college I once asked a Vietnamese fellow named Ng how to pronounce his name and he replied “Mmmmm, like so many M’s.” Whenever I tell this story to anyone, they say I’m nuts and that all the people they know named Ng pronounce it “ing”. I’m guessing some people named Ng tolerate the “ing” pronunciation because it’s easier for us Americans, kind of like some Chinese people named Wang who tolerate the their name being pronounced “wang” instead of “wong”.
Many German names start with four consonants. Schmidt, Schwartz, Schneider, etc. English speakers don’t seem to have a problem pronouncing those names.
This is largely unrelated, but during the Olympics I noticed a female diver named Li Na (I think). I can’t ever remember hearing such a short name before.
My assumption has always been that they are not in fact transliterations. For them to be transliterations implies some great Office of English Transliterations that arbitrates the spellingo of non-English names, which is obviously not the case.
Each nationality in question (so goes my assumptions) has adopted the “english” alphabet, and adapted it to its own use (there is no universally constant pronunciation of the letter “w”, for example). The Vietnamese, in other words, long ago learned “our” alphabet and have adapted for writing their language. They have their own evolved usages of each letter, and “Ng” is spelled according to the Vietnamese “rules” for use of this alphabet.
As such, it’s not strictly a transliteration, but a Vietnamese word in a Vietnamese style of writing, albeit one derived from a Western alphabet.
Well, my wife’s friend, Margy Trn, found that people didn’t have any trouble remembering that her name was pronounced “turn.”
Car Talk on NPR (yeah, you either love it or hate it) once did a hilarious reading of a fake news story called “Clinton Sends Vowels to Bosnia.” Unfortunately, a quick review of their site subjects they’ve taken it off and now include it in one of their (you gotta pay for it) collections.
For kunilou:
http://www.theonion.com/onion2816/vowels2816.html
Oddly enough, the quote by Grg Mchl has been replaced with one by Grg Hmphrs.