I have a question about this surname, and since I didn't know where to put it I decided to post it here. My cousin who is Vietnamese has Nguyen as her surname, and then my friend who is Chinese has the same surname. I have asked him if he had any Vietnamese blood in him, since I know this is a very popular surname in Vietnam. He said no, he was of pure Chinese blood. Now here is my question...Is this a Chinese surname as well, and if so how would you pronounce it in English? Also is there a possibility that my friend could have Vietnamese blood in him?

Nguyễn = Ruan/Yuan = 阮

Most common Vietnamese last name due to two mass forced conversions. Rarer in China, but it wouldn't be spelled Nguyen.

Your friend could have been a Chinese Vietnamese or from one of such family. I have never in my life met a Chinese with that surname though.

Pronunciation: phonetically closest to "Ng" in English is perhaps "w" as in "wood", uyê is close to u-e. Wuen would be okay.

The closest I can find in English is not 'w', but like 'ng' in 'singing'.
'Nguyen' should be read in one syllable, that would be quite hard. Mandarin Chinese has 'üe' ~ 'uye'. English does not have ü, but German and Mandarin has.

阮=Mandarin ruan3, not 'yuan', seemingly irregular reading of Mandarin. Cantonese: yün5.
The 'r' in (Putonghua) Mandarin is quite hard, like voiced 'sh', perhaps in English most similar to 's' in 'vision'.

There may be another surname, with different tone that are pronounced the same otherwise...

The wife of the Chinese fighter pilot Wang Wei's wife's surname is Ruan.

Don't forget the late chinese actress Ruan Ling Yu

Well that is the way my friend spells it, and he pronounces it as Nu-guy-en. My cousin pronounces it as the way you said "Wuen".

or "long" ... but I couldn't phonetically separate "ng" from those words.



Oh yeah... but wait, I haven't met her either

I have trouble pronouncing the "ng" sound in the beginning of a word rather than the end too.

Yes, some people, American especially, just move "g" one/two place over and read it "Nuygen". I have a cousin name Huy Van Nguyen, when his name is read Nuygen, I teased him "What are you? Dutch?".

an other case of Mandarin R initiaters is N initiated in traditional Han languages.

also in the novel 水滸, there are a family of brothers named 阮.

My favorite Chinese 阮 though would be the eccentric literati of Wei/Jin.
Ruan Ji was especially respected by Sima Zhao for some reason, although he was apolitical, at least on the appearance.
His daughter, or grand daughter, was married into the Sima.
Ruan Fu, IIRC, broke several taboos, and was quite scandalous a figure.

Nguyen can be broken into three parts: ng, uye, and n.
Ng is a sound that exists in English, but as an ending consonant only, such as in singing.
uye is a combinaison of vowel sounds, such as in diphtongs (but with 3, instead of 2 vowel sounds). So the y is a vowel, not a consonant, and is pronounced /i/, not /j/ in the International Phonetic Association system. Then uye is /uie/.
n is of course n.
The people with this last name in China are from a country during the Western Zhou Dynasty in North China. Though there was a governor by this name in Jiao Shi, i doubt he has so many descendant in Vietnam. My guess is when the tax roll was compiled, foreign sounding names were Sinicised. This held true not just in Vietnam, but in provinces North of Vietnam, where people originally spoke their native languages, foreign to Chinese, and therefore had foreign sounding names that neccessitated Sinification to transcribe. This could be true with many Korean names as well.

IIRC, the statelet Ruan was destroyed before Zhou turned their military might onto Yin/Shang.

I don't have DVSKTT with me now, I think it was Nhâm Hiêu (Ran Hao) that ASSIGNED Chinese surnames to the natives. Lê is perhaps the only pure Viet common surname that survived into the modern world.

Nguyễn is so poppular because: a. once the Trầns usurped the Lý's throne, they decreed that all Lýs must be changed to Nguyễn; b. Migrants/captured peasants to the south during Trịnh-Nguyễn division were made to carry the lord's surname; and c. Nguyễn was the last dynasty of Vietnam.

There are numerous Nguyen clans, differed by their middle name (Dang, Thai, Canh, e.t.c) each with their own long history, in Nghe-an (which mean they weren't effected by b & c). I'd love do to research on their origin. There used to be also a village in Northern Vietnam, in which most people had the lastname of Âu-dương (Ouyang), which is a peculiarity. There used to be also some Vũ-văn (Yuwen) in North Vietnam as well, although recently they removed văn to make their surname monosyllable. Would be interesting (but realistically impossible) to know if they had any link with the Xiongnu-originated, aristorcratic clan of which some members might have been exiled "to the border" during Sui and Tang.

Also true for Taiwanese.



Interesting, I do know a Vietnamese classmate with the last name Vu.

Vu does not necessarily have anything to do with Vu-van, just like Yu and Yuwen.

Interesting, so I guess that my friend doesn't have Vietnamese blood in him. If he does, he either does not know, or it is so distant that you can't trace it back. Its funny, so many people in my school have that surname. And the interesting thing is that 12 of them are brothers and sisters. The other 26 are cousins.

This shouldn't belong to the language help section as it has nothing to do with language but to the origin of the vietnamese or connection between chinese/vietnamese, read

http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?showtopic=7396

The first 'ng' in 'singing' is quite much a medial, and you pronounce 'singing' as 'sing-nging' don't you?
A confusion may arise because of the reading of '-ng-g-' like in 'mango'.
I guess native English will first try to pronounce "nguyen" as "ng-gu-yen". (since they also think y functions as a consonant here)
Fast vowel combination can make them merge, modern Mandarin Chinese has 'üe' rather than 'uye' (i and u merged into ü as in German).
Actually, don't you think that medial 'u' can function as a glide 'w'? (resulting in somehing like "ngwien"?)

But Isn't "Lê" itself also a Chinese surname? (黎)
Why did they choose Nguyễn as the substitute? And is it now true that there are no Lý among Vietnamese?
I thought those persons (having Nguyen Dang etc.) just have single surname with 3-syllabic proper name... And it looks like "Hong Kong/Taiwan style maiden surname" (2 different surnames in a line).

Not knowing what the medial ''u" or the glide "w" are, I'm guessing that the answer may be "yes."

There are more than a hundred of Vietnamese last names.
They all can be written in Chinese.
Few Vietnamese last names cannot be written in Chinese.

You cannot find any method to convert the sound or the written for them
from Chinese to Vietnamese or vise versa.

Which Vietnamese surnames don't have a Hanzi/Chu-nho counterpart?

Anything can be written in Chinese characters (London = Lun dun, Afganistan = Ah fu han...etc)
What he meant is that some Vietnamese surnames do not have Chinese roots although they can be written in Chinese.
For example: some Vietnamese people have the surname Che, which is the surname of Cham royals who were ruling south Vietnam until 15th century

Bad example.
The Cham names themselves were quite unlike Vietnamese. The name should be like... Po Kaprah (he was a Cham king, I forgot his Vietnamese name).
So I think Che is given by Vietnamese to Cham kings, should be 茶. ("old" reading)

Surnames that cannot be written in Chinese should be from minorities, e.g. Lo from White Tai. (I'm not sure about this though)

Nguyen is pronounced as 'Ng' and 'uen' in one syllable. A more appropriate Pin yin would be Nguen similar to the sound Yuen for mandarin.

I feel amazed that a large percentage of vietnamese has this surname when they are not blood-related ?

Here is one English name Wien is closer to proper Vietnamese pronounciation of ' Nguyen '

click on below link,listen to first syllable of the word ' wien er '

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/wiener

haha ... I say interesting too,and learning something new here ( lol ).As a Chinese-Vietnamese,I've never met anyone of my background has ' Nguyen ' for Chinese family name 阮.It's not a common surname like Wong Chan Lee among ethnic Chinese population worldwide.

This has me think,some of my Chinese-Vietnamese friends adopted ' Vietnamized ' romanization Huynh & Hoang for 黃 ( Cantonese:Wong , Mandarin: Huang ).

Here is profile of prominent Chinese-Vietnamese named Yalek Huynh 黃侯彬,he co-anchors local KTSF Cantonese News for nearly 20 years.His family left S Vietnam to settled in Hong Kong when he was just a kid.

English:

http://www.ktsf.com/en/news/yalek.html.

Chinese:

http://www.ktsf.com/cn/news/yalek.html

Hi all, famous Vietnamese poker player Scotty Nguyen name is pronounced as Wynn or Win. TrueViet says there are about a hundred Vietnamese family names but there seems to be 3 or 4 which appear to be extremely common. I am not sure of the percentages but Nguyen, Tran and Ly combined I suspect may be in the majority or close to it. Can anyone give accurate figures?

Nguyen & Tran account for nearly 50%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_name

No, it doesn't sound like 'wiener' with consonant 'W', the consonant of "'Nguyen" is 'Ng' which is a nasal consonant found in most southern chinese languages such as hokkien, cantonese, hakka.

I still can say a few simple Vietnamese words,it doesn't have ' nasal consonant.