Why are so many asian names spelled oddly when written with the roman alphabet?
Why weren’t the normal spelling rules (for whatever country first translated the name) used when the name was first expressed using the roman alphabet? Is this just another of those abuses inflicted on immigrants in the early 1900’s?
I’d really like to find and hurt the idiot that decided a name pronounced as “Hwin” should be spelled as Nguyen.
Nguyen is a perfect translation. It’s just that English speakers have difficulty with an ng (as in sing) at the beginning of a word, and so the closest approximation is “hw.”
Families I know with the name anglicize it to something closer to “New-in.”
I had a T.A. in college who’s name, Xhu, was pronounced “shu”. Everyone thought that was funny. They’d never heard of the Brazilian celebrity – Xuxa, similarly pronounced “shusha”
The Asian characters have been translated into Western characters. No one ever claimed they were translated into phenoms for American English pronunciation. Look to how certain letter groups are pronounced in French, and compare those to how Asian nations dominated by France pick Western characters to make the sounds of their names.
Did you ever get a call back from that message of yours to Yves Saint-Laurent on the topic of “Why-Vee doesn’t make a sound like ee in English, ya moron, and you can’t get san from Saint, neither”?
I can’t say anything about the system that produced “Nguyen”…
But with Chinese at least, a lot of the common differences in spellings come from different Romanization systems. Historically, Wade-Giles was the standard system used by westerners, but it has been discarded by the Chinese in favor of Pinyin. My non-expert understanding is that Wade-Giles is a pretty good mapping between Chinese phonemes and how an English speaker would try to write down the unfamiliar sounds. As a result, some phonemes require a pile of consonants, some Roman letters just aren’t used, and subtly different phonemes (to the English ear) aren’t well distinguished.
Of course, since it was the system used by westerners in China, Wade-Giles also carries a lot of imperialist baggage.
Pinyin is the modern system used by the Chinese. I believe it is a much more efficient use of roman letters, but as a result some letters are pronounced in completely different ways. Thus, “j” and “ch” are different sounds in Pinyin, but both are pronounced sort of like “ch” in English. “x” in Pinyin is pronounced “sh”, etc. It’s a more useful system for the Chinese to use, but a naive English speaker wouldn’t pronounce it correctly.
Yep, it’s Pinyin for Chinese names and it isn’t that the spellings are poor, it’s that English speakers pronounce “x” and “zh” and various other sounds differently than Pinyin.
Nguyen is how it is written in Vietnamese.
Are there any major languages which use the western alphabet who pronounce x as sh? English, french, german, danish, dutch, spanish, no. Why x for sh then?
Spanish, yes, at least Old Spanish, and Portuguese.
But it’s probably more to do with the fact that redundant letters are most easily repurposed.
In pinyin, sh is used for a different sound. It’s quite similar to the English “sh,” but, uh, pronounced more toward the back of the mouth and slightly less breathy. Don’t know how else to describe it.
Agree with Dr. Drake – my WAG as to why pinyin uses x is that there’s no Mandarin equivalent of the sound and it therefore wasn’t needed elsewhere in the pinyin system.
There are many places in the Yucatan where x is pronounced as sh. Examples: Uxmal, Xcalak, Xpujil. There is the tourist attraction Xcaret, which is pronounced “Shkaret”.
Yep, Nguyễn. And it’s not pronounced “hwin” in the native language. The “ng” is exactly the right sound in English orthography, except that it doesn’t occur in an initial position in English. I have never heard it pronounced as “hwin,” in English, either. Usually, it’s “win” or “nuwen.”
Vietnamese actually uses the Latin alphabet, but with diacritical marks to indicate variations in the pronunciation of the vowel and also for the tones. Vietnamese also has three major dialects and a number of minor dialects, so it depends on what part of the country the family hails from as to how they’ll pronounce the name.
FTR: The name is written Nguyễn in Vietnamese.
Drat. Beat to the punch.
I understand that languages use different sounds and spellings, which means weird-looking names are inevitable.
My point was that when there’s no common alphabet to carry that baggage, why aren’t names so spelled as they sound, using the spelling rules of the language they’re translated into?
Maltese too.
But when linguists use <x> in general, it stands for the voiceless velar fricative. This includes the crafting of alphabets for previously unwritten languages.
Nguyễn is pronounced with an initial sound of [ŋ] as in sing, but formed simultaneously with the rounded lips used to pronounced [w]. That sound is released into a diphthong of [iə] (a quick “ee-uh”) and finally [n]: [ŋ[sup]w[/sup]iən]. It’s all one syllable.
The labialized velar nasal [ŋ[sup]w[/sup]] is a very unfamiliar initial consonant sound for English speakers. Sorry. But you know, language geeks, J.R.R. Tolkien made one of his Tengwar Elven letters with that sound. For example, in the middle of the name Tengwar.
So when you move, you should re-spell your name for the country you’re in? If a Chinese person called Xu moves to England, they should be Shoe, but in Wales they’d be Siw and in France they’d be Chou? I am not sure that solves the problem.
But your example is from Vietnamese, which is written in the Latin alphabet. The names aren’t changed in English (apart from dropping diacritics) for the same reason that Dutch, Polish or Spanish names aren’t changed, even though those languages have different rules connecting spelling with pronunciation.
Like everyone else has already said, your example is from Vietnamese, which is actually written with Latin Alphabet extended with diacritical marks. Therefore Vietnamese names written in their own alphabet stay the same when written in any other language using the same alphabet, except the diacritics may be dropped (even though they don’t need to be dropped as computer fonts are well capable of depicting them). Your complaint in the OP is ignorant, as the name Nguyễn is not pronounced the way you claim, it’s actually a very good way to write those sounds. The basis for the modern Vietnamese Alphabet was laid in the 17th century by the French scholar Alexandre de Rhodes as he created the first dictionary between Vietnamese and both Latin and Portuguese, and based on his work, the Vietnamese scholars created the Quốc Ngữ, based on the Portuguese variant of Latin alphabet, obviously with many Portuguese characteristics. French later on had a major influence, and of course there are also some homegrown quirks introduced during the centuries and when spoken dialects have been changing but written language stays the same, just like what happens in European languages, too.
Plenty of well known names are spelt differently in different countries, though. For example, Mikhail Gorbachev is Mikhaïl Gorbatchev in French, and who do you reckon the Latvians call Džordžs Volkers Bušs?
But Gorbachev writes his name as Михаи́л Серге́евич Горбачёв, and different languages using the Latin alphabet transliterate Cyrillic differently.
In the case of Džordžs V. Bušs, Latvians have decided to change the spelling of foreign names to reflect their spelling rules, probably because those rules are much more consistent than those of English. Most Latin-alphabet languages don’t do that.
So old Spanish (not the one in use since pinyin has been in use), a couple of yucatan languages and portuguese. Also sh representing a sound which is more akin to the sound in loch, which is already represented by an x in several languages. I’m still unsure why x stands for sh in western alphabetical representations of chinese words.
I also thought it sometimes stood for ch, as in church. Am I wrong?