Pronunciation of "Ngaio"

Mark Mandel thnidu at GMAIL.COM
Sun May 10 02:32:49 UTC 2009


I wouldn't count on sports announcers to manage an initial velar nasal if
their jobs depended on it ... or on their employers to insist. OTOH, I
wouldn't count on WP authors to have checked the individual's own use.
There's no reference in the article for *his* pronunciation of the name, or
discussion of the question:

*Dat Tan Nguyen* (pronounced ...) [IPA deleted]

If I had to guess, I'd say that someone just put in the (a?) Vietnamese
pronunciation, quite impersonally (so to speak).

m a m

On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 7:53 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

>
> Yes, I remember Scotty Nguyen (with the
> pronunciation you note) from WSOPs past.  There's
> also a Dallas Cowboys linebacker and now coach
> named Dat Nguyen from Vietnam (although he grew
> up in Texas).  According to the wiki site for him
> at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dat_Nguyen the
> name is pronounced Vietnamese style with initial
> velar nasal (note the IPA transcription at the
> beginning), but I seem to recall that was not the
> standard practice by announcers when he was
> playing.  Another web site suggests "[win]",
> which I suspect is intended to represent [wIn] as
> in Scotty.  Kudos to wikipedia for the old
> college try, though.
>
>

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