I recognize that “Nguyen” is a transliteration from Vietnamese, but it seems to me like the crappiest job of transliteration I’ve ever seen.
When Betty Nguyen (CNN) pronounces her own name, it sounds to me like “Nwinn” or, if there is an ever-so-slight ‘g’ sound in there (which I really don’t hear), you might spell it “Ngwinn.”
Was it the French colonialists who screwed up the spelling so badly? Does “Nguyen” come out as “Ngwinn” using French rules of pronunciation?
There is an initial unvoiced glottal stop position from which the name is spoken. It is very subtle, far beyond general European speech differentiation, but present to Vietnamese speakers.
Say “win” in English. Now, put your throat in the glottal stop position, and then say “wyn” without voicing the glottal stop. Do you hear the difference? Probably not. It’s there, though, when you speak Vietnamese.
Tris
It’s an old problem. Remember, it’s the French who are responsible for the “ough” ending in English.
However, like “ough*,” I’m sure the spelling is a good rough approximation the word “Nguyen.” It’s likely that many Nguyens changed the pronunciation when they started speaking English.
*originally pronounced “oo” with the representing the velar fricative in the German “ach.” There was no letter to indicate that sound, but “gh” is a pretty good approximation.
I don’t think it follows French rules at all, partly because the French don’t have anything like the “ng” sound at the start of words, and partly because the “en” at the end of the word would nasalise the sound if it were a French word. The person setting up the system of using the Latin alphabet would have not followed the French model very much, partly because French has such idiosyncratic rules which aren’t found even in closely related languages, and partly because Vietnamese is so totally different from French, including being a tonal language.
Actually, there was a letter for the “gh” sound: it was the yogh. This letter got dropped by Norman French scribes, who substituted “gh” because they didn’t have a yogh in Norman French.
It’s more the “uyen” part of the spelling that troubles me. How does that come out as “in”? Why not just spell it Ngwin? Or Nguin?
quốc ngữ is a true bastard. Take a distinctly nonChinese language, give it Chinese characters for 1000 years, replace with a Portuguese merchant dictionary, sprinkle French influence for 300 years and you have one of the worlds strangest written forms.
Very strictly, the vowels in “Nguyen” constitute a triphthong. At conversational speeds, the “y” and the “e” lose their distinction, and kind of come out like an English short “i”.
Let’s break it down, bowdlerizing as needed:
Ng-: like the “ng” in “singer”, only at the beginning of the word. For most Western listeners, and at conversational speeds, this sound at the beginning of a word sounds much like regular old “n”. “Singer” and “sinner” are easy to tell apart – lop off that “si-”, and it becomes a little tougher.
-u-: long “u” sound as in “juke” … but with a vowel following, it becomes the auditory equivalent of English “w”.
-y-: long “e” sound as in “meat”, although very much clipped and altered at conversational speed. In fact, it can be shown that this vowel tends to kind of merge with the following one (see below).
-e-: short “e” sound as in “met”. Under the influence of the preceding -y-, this vowel tends to raise to more of a short “i” sound as in “mitt”.
-n: the familiar “n” we all know and love.
If you enter “Nguyen, surname” into Wikipedia, you get a helpful article that gives the phonetic symbols for the breakdown I gave above. It’s in the very first paragraph. The upshot is that “Nguyen” is very much like a Vietnamese version of “Worcester” or “forecastle” – they could hypothetically be pronounced exactly as spelled, or they can be run through at conversational speed and thus become altered, with the altered pronunciation becoming the “correct” version. See also English “jeet jet?” for “Did you eat yet?”
More to this question: if Vietnamese had not been committed to the Roman alphabet fairly early (well, late 1700s IIRC), “Nguyen” almost certainly would be transliterated as something more like “Ngwin”. But since the name is already in Roman letters, that spelling just gets kept. Much like no one transliterates the German surname “Schwarz” as English “Shwarts”.
I realized that I spit out the term triphthong without a definition. Here is the Wikipedia article. Follow the link at the bottom to read about diphthongs, as well – it will help.
It just occured to me that this is not accurate. “Nguyen” is not a transliteration – indeed, disregarding the tone markings, that is exactly the way “Nguyen” is written in Vietnamese.
Transliteration, if I understand correctly, implies rendering from one writing system to another. Both Vietnamese and English use the Roman alphabet, so transliteration is unnecessary.
Yes, but Vietnamese was not always written using the Roman alphabet. Until the 17th century, Vietnamese was written using characters based on Chinese. So it was transliterated, just not during the lifetime of anyone living.
PS - as a (half) Vietnamese guy, I always thought Nguyen was speeled just like it sounds. 
That’s right. However, Vietnamese was once written using Chinese characters (just as Korean used to be also, and Japanese still is). So when Vietnamese started to be written using the Latin alphabet, it was a sort of transliteration of the older writing, even if it no longer is in any meaningful way a transliteration.
By now, I’m quite used to the “ng” sound appearing at the beginning of a syllable. It’s actually fun to pronounce.
At least beyond mine. I had a roommate in college named Nguyen. I tried hard to learn how to say his name to his satisfaction, but never could. I would swear I was saying it right, but he was hearing some subtle difference that I wasn’t. (or he was messing with me…)
Jeet? Squeet!
It works both ways. My real name is a very common, ordinary, run-of-the-mill American name. But the Thais simply cannot pronounce it correctly.
Worse still was the case of my Chinese in-laws – the Chinese parents of my Thai wife. In their dialect, syllables simply do NOT begin with how my name begins, and syllables do NOT end with how my name ends. They renamed me with a very nice name that came close and had a very nice meaning.
Any language where the accents have accents is OK with me.
It’s a fairly common triphthong. In fact, Uyen is a name all by itself. And there is no W in the Vietnamese alphabet except for some imported words.
This fact simultaneously makes the problem better and also worse for Westerners trying to get a handle on it. Take the surnames Le and Ly for example. In Australia (and likely in the US too), they are pronounced Lee and Lye respectively, by the locals. Many Vietnamese will just introduce themselves this way, as it’s simply easier. Trouble is, this way, you’ll never learn that Le is more like “Lay” and Ly is closer to “Lee”. Problems arise because some people stick to the proper pronunciation and others don’t. Similarly, some stick to surname first, and others don’t.
It would be kinda convenient if a newly arrived migrant community and the host community sat down and decided on universal rules on this, but of course that would be unworkable and a tad paternalistic maybe.