Ng is a Chinese name, not Vietnamese. If you knew a Vietnamese by that name, he must have been ethnically Chinese.
Nguyen is a Vietnamese name, and an incredibly common one. Something like a third of Vietnamese use it, at least in the South. It should actually be spelled with a circumflex (^) over the “e” and a tilde (~) over the circumflex.
How is it pronounced? Well that’s complicated. The “ng” is just like the “ng” in singing, but it’s at the beginning of the word. The “u” is long, like in French. The “yen” is something between “een” and “ihn”. Now for the tonality. It start with a falling voice and ends with a rising voice. That’s in the South anyway. In the north it is pronounced with a high, “squeaking” voice. Are you sorry you asked?
For what it’s worth, I once had a classmate named Nguyen, and she pronounced it “Quinn”. I think that she was an nth generation American, and spoke English as her first language, so she might not have been able to pronounce it in the Vietnamese manner, herself.
Another point to remember is that a, e, i, o, and u are not the only letters which can be used as vowels. In some languages, f, h, l, m, n, r, s, v, and z can be used for the same purposes, as well-- In general, any sound which you can hold for an extended period of time can act as a vowel. This sounds strange to us, of course, since we’re used to the five English vowels and their varients, but to a person raised saying those sounds, they’re perfectly natural.
But those four letters only spell two sounds. In Bulgarian, all the sounds are apparently pronounced individually (it’s phonetic).
Georgian must be a good language for consonants as well. Today I found out about the word “vprtskni”. No, I don’t know what it means. As another friend put it:
“Vprtskni: Sep konsonantoj, unu silabo. Estu tima!” (Seven consonants, one syllable. Be afraid!)
My last name is Ng, and I (as well as everyone I’ve every known with the same last name) pronounce it as ‘ing’.
As for Nguyen, I believe it basically sounds like “win”, except that you blend an ‘n’ into the ‘w’, making it come out as something on the order or ‘nwin,’ all as one syllable. At least, that’s how I’ve always heard it pronounced.
A name is pronounced how the person that the name belongs to pronounces it, not how oters percieve it. Of course, it is up to the person with the name to inform others of incorrect pronunciation of their name if it is necessary or they actually care.
Sorry I have to do this but a little bit of Monty Python:
Interviewer: Good evening. I have with me in the studio tonight one of the country’s leading skin specialists - Raymond Luxury Yacht.
Raymond: That’s not my name.
Interviewer: I’m sorry - Raymond Luxury Yach-t.
Raymond: No, no, no - it’s spelt Raymond Luxury Yach-t, but it’s pronounced ‘Throatwobbler Mangrove’.
Interviewer: You’re a very silly man and I’m not going to interview you.
English orthography is said to be farther from its phonology than any other language, which irritated George Bernard
Shaw. He said might as well spell FISH as GHOTI. The gh as in words like ENOUGH, the o as in WOMEN, and the ti as in any number of words ending in tion, thus FISH. 2) I’ve often wondered since reasing Edgar Rice Burroughs how to pronounce MBONGA, the name of an (I think) evil chieftain.
3) Ellis Island officials weren’t the only people who changed other people’s names to suit them. Almost any name you can think of has undergone many spelling and pronunciation changes throughout the centuries, as any genealogist will tell you, to his or her despair.
4) Some dare say it seems pompous, pretentious, and impertinent to go parading about calling attention to oneself by maintaining a complicated name, including hyphenated ones because of marriage. In the old days when someone laughed at your name, you changed it. Nowadays you feel oppressed and complain about your rights. Thus Monte Python! The British have always thought that people who try to act over themselves are figures of fun. But live and let live.
5) Movie stars used to have such nice, euphonious names. Now they keep their ugly names they were born with, some say. But don’t blame me.
Tibetan orthography is even farther away from its pronunciation than English. For example, sprul sku is pronounced “tulku”.
Irish spelling, before the modern spelling reform, was probably even farther off than that. Something on the order of 70-80% of the letters in a word being silent. Now they’ve got it down to 40-50%.
Some consonants can be “syllabic” consonants, meaning they function as vowels. The class of sounds known as “sonants” have the requirements to fill the bill: they are voiced (made with the vocal cords humming), and can be held for some duration (unlike stop consonants). The sonants are the liquids l, r and the nasals m, n.
English has these syllabic consonants, although our spelling disguises them. They form the final sounds in the words little, bummer, reason, spasm. Actually the final -sm in words like spasm and communism is an undisguised syllabic consonant. There’s no schwa sound, just a sonant.
Proto-Indo-European had these syllabic consonants, too; they survived in the middle of words mainly in Czech, Slovak, and Serbo-Croatian, in names like Krk, Srb, Vlk. Sanskrit makes use of the syllabic r in words like Rgveda – in ancient times it must have been pronounced they way it is in Serbo-Croatian, but modern pandits add a vowel sound and pronounce it as ri.
The tilde tonal mark is called dâú ngã and let’s not get into how that is pronounced. Here’s how the name should be written, in case you want to impress your Vietnamese friends:
~
Nguyên
Except the ngã should have less helium in it when you write it. Many Vietnamese will tell us to pronounce their names in a variety of ways simply because they would rather not go into the whole tonal explanation and even if they did we would still screw it up and probably turn their name into a curse word. So they tell us just to pronounce it “Win”, which is pretty close.
The only exception I make is those who insist on pronouncing it “Noodgen”. I can’t forgive anybody but the severely dislexic pronouncing it this way.