Wednesday, September 24, 2025

What's in a name?

 

I don't quite know how to put this in a family-friendly blog, but a Vietnamese singer has just won the Intervision music contest in Russia.  Congratulations, and all that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, the name of the winner might as well have been made for Internet jokesters.  Read it for yourself.

Let's just say that the poultry farm jokes being made on some European forums are . . . ah . . . awkward.







Peter


12 comments:

BillB said...

I had a Vietnamese coworker whose name was even more inappropriate in English. His family name which comes first was/is Long. His personal name was the last three letters of his family name preceded by a d.

(If you don't want to publish, at least you can have a laugh.)

Magson said...

I grew up with a Vietnamese kid named Hung Duong. Yes, we laughed... He rolled with it just fine too. But, he told me at one point that it was actually pronounced like "Hong Yoong" despite how it looked to us English-speakers.

My company employs several Vietnamese folks, so in an effort to learn to pronounce their names properly I went looking for a video on how to do so. That name "Phuc" is one of those demonstrated in this one that I found. I've got the link queued up to that moment, and the lady says it means "happiness." --

https://youtu.be/F60YSypuwrs?si=HCrBKWIXqih4R6i2&t=869

Uchuck the Tuchuck said...

Had a student down at Auburn with the moniker "Phuc N. Ho" (middle name Nguyen) on his records. We agreed to simply address him as Mister Ho.

Birdchaser said...

Long Duk Dong was in Sixteen Candles.

JNorth said...

I have always wondered who's fault is it that most of that part of the world pronounces Latin alphabet words so strangely, I'd assume the Dutch or Portuguese but Dutch is Germanic and Portuguese is Latinic and their pronunciations are nothing like either.

Too bad my great uncle Bernard isn't still alive, he might know, he was a minister who created multiple written languages for African languages that did not have writing, primarily so they could have copies of the Bible in their own language but writing is pretty useful all around.

boron said...

Peter Schmuck (double entendre?) was inducted as a NYS Supreme Court Justice in April 1928.

Anonymous said...

In the mid 80's, I did orientation for a job at IBM with a Vietnamese man named Phuoc Tran (pronounced 'fuck tran'!). Our new boss politely said "We'll just call you 'Tran' ". I ran into him over twenty years later and he was still just called "Tran".

Old NFO said...

Oof...

Magson said...

@JNorth -- The issue is that when the French took over Vietnam, they enforced using the Roman alphabet rather than their native writing system. Vietnamese is a tonal language, though, so the Roman alphabet is wholly unsuited to it. The Vietnamese added 6 "accents" or "tonal indicators" to the alphabet to help, but overall it's still very much a case of an unsuitable wiritng system merely approximating the actual sounds of the language.

Kinda like in Korean, they have borrowed "ice cream" as a word and say it just like it sounds in English, but it's spelled "a-i-seu-keu-rim" in their writing system, since it's wholly unsuited to English spellings. English's 1-syllable word "twice" is technically 4 syllables in Korean's writing (teu-wa-ee-seu) when directly transliterated. And Vietnam had to do that with their entire language.

When English forsook Runes in favor of the Roman alphabet, we had something similar happen as well, which is why our spelling is such a mess and we have oddities like "Read and lead rhyme, as do read and lead, but read and lead don't rhyme, nor do read and lead."

Perhaps someday we'll come up with a universal writing system, but... today is not that day.

Brick Hardslab said...

Went to school with a Phuc. Vietnamese refugee. The office and teachers just left off half his name.

Robert said...

Magson:

That was enlightening! Thankyew.
We had a soup place owned by an immigrant who spoke very limited english. He name his business after his specialty. He went through proper channels for permits, licensing, etc. Our newspaper covered the Grand Opening of Phu King. There were complaints... Things eventually calmed down. "Phu" is pronounced "Foe".

Robert said...

A long time ago, my father bought a 12 gauge shotgun from a Polish immigrant. It jammed after busting about five clay pigeons. After the gunsmith replaced a broken spring, he asked why the gun was booby trapped. There was a steel rod inside the stock jammed between the butt plate and a deer slug round with the sharpened point of the rod firmly against the primer! Possibly because the seller's last name was "Shitman"...