Yep, it’s just a nasal “ng” sound. I’ve also heard it pronounced “n@g” (@ being a schwa sound), but I think that’s just an Englishified version.
When I hear it the schwa seems to carry through the word up to the stop on the ‘g’ at the end. Not sure how to describe that. It’s a lot easier when it’s just pronounced Ing or Eng. (Was Ng the actual name of the Siamese twin?)
Note that English speakers can pronounce some vowel-less words like mm-hmm (indication of agreement or understanding, sort of like unh-huh), and nn-nn (minimal version of unh-unh).
What about the name “Hsu”, which is pronounced “shoo”? Why switch the “h” and the “s”? Why not “Shu”?
I tend to agree that the stumbling block is the fact that the “ng” is at the beginning of the name; we (English speakers) generally don’t emphasize the “g” at the end of words like we do at the beginning.
and even in English it isn’t internally consistent. For example, I’d wager most of us pronounce “Alexander” more like “alegzander.”
Because if you spelled it “Shu,” people might think it’s the same as the English sh-sound, which it’s not. My limited understanding is that it’s close to Russian Щ, /ɕ/. If you speak English, try making the “ch” sound as in “choose” and then, without moving tongue or lips, say “shoes.” It should be a different initial sound than what you normally make for “shoes.”
The nasal sound itself is a sonorant (you can hum it all by itself) and can function as a syllable nucleus all on its own, just the same as if it were a vowel. It’s called a syllabic [ŋ]. There’s no schwa involved. There’s a syllabic [n] in the word mitten. It isn’t pronounced *[mɪtən]; it’s [mɪt.n]. The [n] forms a syllable all by itself without needing a vowel. You can do the same with [ŋ].
Because that sound is historically an /h/ that got palatalized to [ɕ] (Dr. Drake is correct about that). It needs a distinct spelling to tell it apart from the other Chinese “sh” phoneme /ʂ/ which is retroflex. Two completely different sounds in Mandarin (and in Polish too, which gives Poles a leg up on speaking Mandarin), even if English speakers can’t tell the difference because they both sound like [ʃ] to us.
<Hs> is the old Wade-Giles spelling, which is now obsolete everywhere except for Taiwan. The Pinyin spelling of that sound is <x>.
In non-Mandarin languages, that sound generally corresponds to an actual /h/. Compare:
Pinyin: Gong xi fa cai
W-G: Kong hsi fa ts‘ai
Cantonese: Gung hey fat choi
Would that be pronounced, “Lashatives”?
Just to pick nits. The Cantonese Hey is a completely different sound than the “x” pinyin or W-G “hs”. In other words, it’s not a different spelling/romanization of the same sound, it’s a different language (ok call it a dialect).
Wade-Giles in Taiwan is bastardized. The street signs and proper nouns are Wade-Giles *without *the aspiration apostrophe, hence rendering the pronunciation ambiguous. Eg, Taipei rather than Taip’ei. I haven’t checked for a few decades but probably you can still buy dictionaries in Taiwan that use W-G along with Bopomofo.
IIRC, that’s exactly what she said! The Cantonese sound is different, in both sound and in the most conventional Romanized spelling, but it is a cognate sound (if that’s the right phrase) for a lot of words, apparently.
Rather like, say, “ll” in Spanish is often cognate to “pl” in Latin, French, and Italian.
I know that. That’s why I was presenting it alongside Mandarin for comparison. Cantonese retained a historical [h] sound from Ancient Chinese that has shifted to a different sound in Mandarin. That was actually the entire point of posting it, in answer to the question of why anyone would use the spelling <hs>. Wade-Giles romanization conveys historical information about given Chinese characters’ old pronunciations, but is not very applicable to contemporary pronunciations. The logogram in either case is the same: 喜 (JKellyMap, that’s right: a cognate.)
To the OP:
Imagine, if you will, Asian languages being the proverbial square peg, and the English-speaking egotistical explorers/conquerers being the proverbial round hole.
Each set of explorer/conquerers would find a new way to twist that square peg before pounding the ever-lovin’ shit out of it to force it into the square hole.
NO fit will be perfect. And different hunks of the square peg will be shaved off to force it into the round hole.
~VOW
Heh, that’s a great explanation.
The more important question about the pronounciation of Nguyen, in my view, is “What happened to the ‘y?’”
Is y always pronounced like a w? Does it simply represent a transition between any two vowels? Or what?
Looks like uy is pronounced “wi” in Vietnamese.
Got your point this time around. thanks
That was my impression. And the ‘ng’ is left off the beginning for us westerners.
I worked with a Vietnamese man whose last name was Nguyen. I had received a call from Payroll to say they had an OT check for him. The caller gave some mutilated pronunciation.
So I asked him, “How DO you say your last name?”
He had to work with me to get an approximation. The sounds are made in the throat, and it was hard to twist my Westernized speech into his language.
The best I can represent it with our letters would be “Ngwhahn.” The “Ng” part is sort of “swallowed” when you vocalize it.
I kept trying, and he was VERY patient with me. And we had a good laugh. I got high praise for my final efforts.
And I also told him that I am embarassingly monlingual. I have nothing but admiration for the immigrants who come to the US and speak English. Even the ones who butcher English, damn, at least they TRY.
I once told a lady I worked with from Eastern Europe the same thing: that I completely admire someone who has English as a second language.
She stunned the socks off me by saying, “Oh, English isn’t my SECOND language. It’s my FIFTH.”
I stand in awe.
~VOW
Here again we can see why Vietnamese uses the specific spelling it does: There are two different diphthongs made of /u/ followed by /i/. So Vietnamese spells them differently:
ui is pronounced [uj] (a falling diphthong)
uy is pronounced [wi] (a rising diphthong).
Note also that “yê” is pronounced [iə] (a falling diphthong), so the vocalic nucleus of Nguyễn is in effect a triphthong [wiə], which rises and then falls. But I don’t know why “uyê”=[wiə] isn’t among the triphthongs listed at that WP link.
Well , the English-speaking dudes are the ones who managed to come up with several different spellings all by their lonesome, due in part to English spelling inconsistencies, but other foreigners had also come up with their own transliterations - which of course don’t match those of the English speakers and which of course the English speakers wouldn’t accept (barbarians, those Portuguese…).
So, tangents and emotion-only responses aside, it seems the answer to my original question is “because those are the closest approximations possible with the spelling rules of (whatever language first transliterated the name into latin characters)”, correct?
and that my example was a particularly bad one because Vietnamese already uses the latin alphabet.
I was under the impression that the odd-looking spellings were the result of either:
- a set of arbitrary transliteration rules that don’t match the pronunciation or spelling rules of any modern language (similar to those supposedly “international” symbols used in traffic signs, software toolbars, and the like)
or - an asian-hating immigration worker in the early 1900’s writing names weirdly to punish the people for being foreign.
Here’s how I’m thinking transliteration should be (and, according to many comments, actually is) done:
Translator: What’s your name? and how do you spell it?
International Traveler: says name and spells in native, non-latin alphabet
Translator: okay, here’s how it’d be spelled in (official language of whatever country the person is trying to enter).