Orthography question: "N'guyen"
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2006 07:08:58 -0500
From: "Dan Duffy" <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Vsg] orthography question: "N'guyen"
Hi all,
Thanks for the replies about Christian forms of address. They hit all the issues I need to deal with Roman Catholic and Baptist Vietnamese in North Carolina.
Here's another one: why does French film-maker Francois Truffaut's makeup artist spell her name "Thi Loan N'guyen"? That is, with an apostrophe between the "N" and the "g", as if there was a click in there.
It shows up that way on all Truffaut's films, from the beginning to the end. Since Thi Loan is one of Truffaut's longtime collaborators, I presume she controlled how her name appeared.
Does anyone know why she spells it that way? It stands out among Vietnamese in Western film credits of the 1950s and 60s in that it makes the spelling more, rather than less, different.
In California at that time, where Nguyens were more novel than in Paris, I think the woman with Bill Cosby on I Spy simply dropped the "g", to "Nuyen". Others transformed it to "Nugent", a pioneer name like Van Zandt, common from Carolina through the Southwest to California.
But Thi Loan went the other way, or maybe she inherited the spelling. Googling it just now I find French citations to many individuals named "N'guyen." Does anyone know how this started? Is it a way to indicate the glottal "ng"?
Dan
From: "Michele Thompson" <thompsonc2@southernct.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] orthography question: "N'guyen"
Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 10:05:41 -0500
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Dan,
I have no idea how or when this spelling started but in a small WWII military cemetery that I visited in Normandy in September of 2004 there are a number of graves with the surname N'guyen.
Cheers
Michele
Michele Thompson
Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 22:50:14 +0700
From: "Nhu Miller" <trantnhu@gmail.com>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] orthography question: "N'guyen"
Hallo Dan et alia,
It so happens that Nguyen Thi Loan aka Thi Loan Nguyen and France Nguyen
are friends of mine. Loan, tired of people mispronouncing her name, tried to
make it easy for non-Vietnamese by putting an apostrophe between the N and
G. Now why she reversed her name to Thi Loan Nguyen is another matter!
France Nguyen had a French mother and a Vietnamese father. She doesn't
speak Vietnamese, so that's the way she pronounces her own name.Incidentally,
she was discovered working in a NY bakery and whisked into stardom in "The
World of Suzie Wong."
T.T. Nhu
Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 06:28:26 -0800 (PST)
From: "Tai VanTa" <taivanta@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] orthography question: "N'guyen"
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>, dduffy@email.unc.edu
Hi every one,
I have a theory about this writing of the family name Nguyen as N'guyen. As the lower part of this letter of Dan Duffy mentions, the Nguyen name has been mispronounced "as Nugent" by so many people, especially many Americans in all walks of life, including in courts of law, so much that sometimes I jokingly said in courts when a litigant with the family Nguyen appeared : "Another Nugent here!"--half making the people who heard me understand what name I said (because that is the only way they knew about the pronunciation of the name "Nguyen"), half mockingly .(Incidentally, I am a lawyer, in addition to being a social science/law researcher). The French writing "N'guyen", when pronouced by the Western language speakers (French or English or Spanish/Portuguese), would more closely approximate
the Vietnamese pronunciation of Nguyen and is a good cultural interpretation.
Tai Van Ta
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2006 07:24:21 -0700
From: "Nora Taylor" <Nora.Taylor@asu.edu>
Subject: RE: [Vsg] orthography question: "N'guyen"
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Dan,
I am not a linguist but a French speaker so please take this as a non-expert suggestion. A linguist may have a better explanation but I think it is to make it as phonetically accurate as possible for French speakers to pronounce. It is also how some African names are spelled when there is an N followed by a G. The French pronounce Nguyen: En-gu-en. And not: Nuyen like Americans do. They also put two dots over the i in Hanoi, congai and names like Mai to enable the i to be pronounced as a separate vowel rather that prompting a Hanwah or a Meh (as in the month of May)
Nora
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2006 12:17:13 -0500
From: "Dan Duffy" <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
To: "Vietnam Studies Group" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] orthography question: "N'guyen"
Thanks all for offering several grips on a question about writing that,
oddly, is hard to figure out from print sources. I'm sitting here with
several dozen French books in Vietnamese or about Viet Nam, without a
"N'uyen" among them.
But Michele has seen it carved in stone, and Nora and Tai Van Ta and
T.T. Nhu and another, off-list, all offer different testimony that
"N'uyen" is less foreign to a French reader than "Nguyen" is.
I appreciate it -
Dan