So the French decided to give those people the last name, and they chose Nguyen. They chose this name due to it being the final monarchy in Vietnam. However, this event once more escalated the number of Nguyen people in the total population.
Now, whenever you meet a Vietnamese with Nguyen family, not only you can be certain of their country of origin but also now you will know about the special history of their last name. Nguyen reign, the last royal family of Vietnam Similarly, in the 16th century, when Mac's reign was in the fall, Mac members all changed their last name to Nguyen for safety. Ho Chi Minh, the most influential public figure during the Vietnam War also shared Nguyen as a part of his name. His real name is Nguyen Sinh Cung.
Sign up for more like this. Not their name, but how to pronounce it, so that Brittany Nguyen would write "brit-nee win" or something, for example. January 20, pm. There might be regional variation within the US here, because while I've never heard anything but 'win' including from possessors of the name , others disagree.
Is there any consensus as to what the 'best' anglicisation would be? I called it 'appalling' because it seems to reflect nothing but laziness, not even an attempt at following the spelling. January 21, am. The process by which the Vietnamese came to have their Chinese-style surnames is likely to have been similar to the appearance of Chinese-style surnames among other non-sinitic peoples in the far south.
Among the people now known as the Zhuang, this seems to have started as early in the Han dynasty. Whether this ever involved local officials assigning surnames to local people is a moot point. The pattern of surname distribution suggests however that chiefly clans acquired surnames first, which were then adopted by common people within their domains. The result of this was that there were large tracts of territory populated by Huangs, or Qins, or Nongs, and so on.
But this meant that Huangs had to marry Huangs, since there was no-one else around. With the intensification of Chinese rule in recent centuries, rotating officials from elsewhere in the Chinese empire looked on this situation as evidence of widespread and endemic incest, since Chinese marriage rules prohibited marriage between people with the same surname. Of course, to the local people surnames had nothing to do with incest avoidance. I have discussed the dynamics of this situation in some detail in Killing a Buffalo for the Ancestors pp.
The preceding section pp. This is cross-culturally a reasonably common pattern: a not dissimilar pattern is found in the Highlands of Scotland. One of the things that happened after the Chinese armies occupied the Red River valley was attempts to establish Chinese-style marriage and other customs among the native population.
The Hou Han shu details one case in which people were forcibly married at the behest of the local magistrate, Ren Yan on which see Jennifer Holmgren, Chinese colonisation of Northern Vietnam, pp. January 21, pm. One of the problems with the system Martha described where every student writes their name phonetically on a card is that every single student will use their own idiosyncratic phonetic system, all different from each other.
Given that the reader has at most two seconds to absorb the information on the card and say the name, it is much easier to ignore what the student wrote and go from the standard spelling of their name. Unless the reader can practise in advance there's no good solution. Even if everyone knew IPA.
January 22, am. I have reported this before, but it may be worth mentioning again here — when I taught a multi-national class in Paris some two decades or so ago, I asked everyone to tell me their name. One member of the class did not do so, so I went over to her and quietly repeated my request, to which she very politely responded "one minute, please : I need to write it down for you".
She then transcribed her Hungarian name into IPA, after which I was able both to hear it and to pronounce it correctly; the latter would have been virtually possible given only the standard Hungarian orthography.
The power of spelling to interfere with pronunciation of foreign languages is remarkable. I've heard language teachers in the UK lament the difficulty of coaxing pupils into changing how they read aloud from text. January 22, pm. I know a Bulgarian-Vietnamese "Pham" and another who likes to be known as just the be known as "The Lady" the Bulgarian equivalent of.
January 23, pm. The musician Thao Nguyen pronounces her name "win" — at least, that's how it sounds to me. January 24, am. Indeed, when we first met, she insisted that Vietnamese was not a tonal language, even though I was certain from her conversation with a fellow Vietnamese on that occasion that it clearly was …. RSS feed for comments on this post.
Language Log. Home About Comments policy. Two-fifths of the people in Vietnam have the surname Nguyen. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Kimberly Powell. Genealogy Expert. Updated October 15, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format.
Powell, Kimberly. The Meaning and Origin of Nguyen. The Meaning and Origin of the Name Smith. Beside Vietnam this last name occurs in countries. It also occurs in The United States, where 2 percent are found and Laos, where 0 percent are found.
In The United States those bearing the Nguyen last name are 2. The amount Nguyen earn in different countries varies greatly. In Italy they earn Nguyen DNA Website - A web page dedicated to the genetic research of those who bear the surname and its variants.
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