U.S. Surnames with No Vowels

https://blog.plover.com/2022/03/26/#vowelless-names

by RafelMri • 4 years ago

108 95 4 years ago

blog.plover.com

uranusjr• 4 years ago

Nitpick: These are names with no _vowel letters_; many (if not all, depending on how you define what a vowel is) of these letters are pronounced with a vowel.

oehtXRwMkIs• 4 years ago

How do you pronounce anything without a vowel sound?

henrikschroder• 4 years ago

Brrrr, it's cold today!

Broken_Hippo4• 4 years ago

Generally, with an added yet invisible vowel. Entire languages are written without vowels as we (with the latin alphabet/english speakers) would know them. (Hebrew and Arabic are the languages I had in mind).

adrian_b5• 4 years ago

A vowel sound is a sound that can form a syllable alone, without being combined with other sounds, like a consonant, or which can be the peak of sonority in a syllable composed of multiple sounds.

In Latin & Ancient Greek, which are the origin of the grammatical terms that most people learn in school, only A, E, I, O and U could be used as vowels. Because of that, when most people hear about vowels, they think about these sounds.

Nevertheless, in most languages there are also other sounds that can be used as vowels. Even in English, words like "listen" or "often" have 2 syllables and the vowel of the second syllable is "N". Another example is "people", which also has 2 syllables and the second vowel is "L". Among the English speakers, there are variations. In words like the previous examples, some speakers pronounce a short central vowel before the final "N" or "L", which remain consonants, but other speakers transition directly into the final "N" or "L" from the previous plosive, in which case "N" or "L" are the vowels of the second syllable.

Like in English, there are many languages where the liquids (e.g. "L", "R") or the nasals (e.g. "N", "M") may be used as vowels. While English has restrictions for where such vowels may appear, other languages allow their use in much more kinds of sound environments.

These kinds of sounds can be used as vowels when alone or when surrounded by sounds of lower sonority than them, because when they are pronounced there are also paths for the continuous expiration of air through the mouth or nose, even if they are more constricted than in the sounds more frequently used as vowels, e.g. AEIOU (i.e. like you can pronounce continuously AAAAAAAA, you can also pronounce for as long as you want LLLLLLLL or NNNNNNNNNNNN).

timeon2• 4 years ago

of these letters are pronounced with a vowel

maybe in English but not in Slavic languages (at least not in western Slavic).

"prst skrz krk" [ˈpr̩st] [ˈskr̩s] [ˈkr̩k]

forehanddev3• 4 years ago

Western slavic languages still use a version of the 'Close unrounded central vowel' implicitly in pronounciation, even though it is not represented in writing. An example of this would be words in Romanian (which has a character representation for this sound) that were adopted from slavic languages. E.g. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%A2rlog#Romanian

anotherboffin• 4 years ago

There's also a town in Yugoslavia with the name Srb and the surname could mean someone from that town.

Interesting to see Yugoslavia being mentioned when the town is in present-day Croatia (as per the link in the post).

vmception• 4 years ago

Right after mentioning Serbia

I’m thinking either the author had an old map (very common in the US) and has noticed this town before, or identifies as being from Yugoslavia from growing up there at one point (and adopting some identity politics that still separates Serbia), or thinks its synonymous to call the region yugoslavia like the region of nordics has its own name which would just be wrong

dmurray• 4 years ago

Yugoslavia/Yugoslav/South Slavic is a handy name for the region and the language family. Unfortunately it's no longer a neutral name because there was a country with that name and using it might be seen as calling for reconstituting that country and in particular, uniting several nations under Serbian rule.

I think these days we're meant to use "the Balkans" and understand by context that we don't mean Greece. But it's much less precise.

That said, in this context "a town in Croatia" would have been correct, uncontroversial and more precise.

darebak• 4 years ago

From what I remember from school, both Slovak and Serbo-Croatian (maybe all Slavic languages?) have this thing where "R" is behaving kinda like a vowel but it's not a vowel. Can't remember what it is called though.

Gare• 4 years ago

Syllabic "r" [slogotvorno "r"]

American English has it too, for example in pronounciation of "work".

NikolaNovak• 4 years ago

We have lovely words like Krk (name of an island), and Grb (cost of arms).

But even in English, my ignorant self feels the I in "Kirk" is pointless and unnecessary :-)

mjd3• 4 years ago

I thought long and hard about that word and almost made up the nonceword "Southslavia" to replace it.

What I wanted was a word for the southern Slavic _region_, encompassing former Yugoslavia as well as Bulgaria and other territories in adjacent countries. But I couln't find a word for it, and it was getting late.

mrjin• 4 years ago

Oh well, if you take a closer look, you will find why: most if not all of those with surnames look weird in English are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from a non-English speaking background. When they/their ancestors arrived, they most likely do not speak English at all or might be a couple of words, some of them might not even have a surname. When they arrived at the customs, they for sure needed something English on their papers. It would make sense to take what ever came to their mind at that moment as their surname.

Such things can be observed in every English speaking countries I would say. As those surnames were actually picked randomly, and when they/their descendants moved again, they most likely carried that randomly chosen surname with them. And now it becomes quirks that lots of surnames of different spellings are actually exactly the same in their origin. Lots of descendants of immigrants no longer neither can read or write in their own language but English, some might be either able to read or write but hardly anyone can do both.

liversage• 4 years ago

A famous case of this is the Danish man Victor Cornelins that was born in St. Croix but at the age of seven was brought to Denmark to become part of a human exhibition as a "negro kid" to attract visitors. His birth name was Cornelius which is not unusual in Danish so Cornelins must have been a simple writing mistake. However, this lapse is negligible compared to the racism he was subjected to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Cornelins

hereforonep• 4 years ago

No , there are many surnames with multiple spellings in their native language. See e.g Danish Skov Skou Skog etc etc

forehanddev3• 4 years ago

This particular problem, of matching misspelled immigrant surnames was the reason for development of phonetic matching algorithms. See https://stevemorse.org/phonetics/bmpm2.htm

cwmma• 4 years ago

There are plenty native English surnames that came about before spellings standardized leading to (in the case of my own) Metcalf, Metcalfe, Medcalfe, Medcalf, Midcalfe, Midcalf all being the same name.

So even immigrants coming from places that have surnames can have lots of variety before taking into account there isn't always a single best way to write a name in the Latin script.

pessimizer2• 4 years ago

It would make sense to take what ever came to their mind at that moment as their surname.

Or whatever was the first thing that came to the mind of the clerk that was filling out the papers. I know a guy whose family name became "Bohunk" at Ellis Island.

mbg721• 4 years ago

Some surnames that look weird in English happened because there was a word in one language being written with another language's spelling assumptions. (Mine is one that works like that.)

durnygbur• 4 years ago

I was certain it's about Czech surnames, yes it is.

McNutty• 4 years ago

TIL that "Ng" is pronounced "Wu" in Mandarin

rwmj• 4 years ago

Another strange transliteration is the most common Vietnamese-descent surname Nguyễn, pronounced roughly as Win, n-Win or n-Yen (with the n being very quiet). I do wonder why these difficult transliterations were chosen over more obvious ones.

glandium• 4 years ago

What I learned a while ago is that it's pronounced like gwen, but with the tongue deeper in the mouth for the g.

jltsiren• 4 years ago

It's not a transliteration. Vietnamese is written using Latin script. Because the modern script is still relatively new, there is a strong correspondence between the written form and the standard pronunciation. And because Vietnamese is not Latin, many odd-looking compromises had to be made to represent all the sounds using something resembling the Latin alphabet.

The situation with Chinese is similar. Pinyin is not a transliteration standard but a standard way of writing the Beijing dialect phonetically using Latin script.

zo1• 4 years ago

TIL. Been reading that name as "N-Goo-Yen" for the longest time as I haven't spoke to anyone with that name yet.

teddyh• 4 years ago

http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-surnames

wink• 4 years ago

From my very cursory research it could depend on where in Vietnam the person is from. I only did the research because I stumbled over several youtube videos where people were like "you are stupid if you don't pronounce it win" but I thought the guy I knew at school should probably know his name better than random youtube person and he definitely pronounced it between 'n-Yen' and 'n-Youn(g)'.

yorwba• 4 years ago

Or "Huáng" (黄) or "Ruǎn" (阮) or maybe something else, depending on what the actual surname is and where they're from. (阮 is also the Chinese character for the Vietnamese surname Nguyễn.)

cafard• 4 years ago

Kim Ng, who works for the Miami Marlins, pronounces her surname "Ang", I believe.

iNerdier• 4 years ago

‘In the U.S. the confusing haček is dropped from the z and one is left with just Smrz.’

What’s so confusing about a háček?

timeon2• 4 years ago

Maybe that it was just dropped? Instead of using something like Smrzh. For example Slovenian surname Klobučar -> Klobuchar.

vasco• 4 years ago

There's not many accents or variations from basic ascii in english, so anything squiggly is usually confusing. In my language we use a few accents and character variations and I often meet Americans who have never seen such character variations like ç and get confused. Perhaps the author had similar experiences.

smcl2• 4 years ago

I think it's confusing to non-speakers of Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croat and Slovene because they may just not be 100% on how it should be pronounced. Quite a few names get mangled when used in US English even when the letters don't have háčky, čárky etc. Brett Favre becomes "Brett Farve", Weird Al Yankovic's surname is pronounced "Yankovik" (not "Yankovitch"), anything ending in "-owski" is pronounced "OW-skee" (instead of ov-skee).

parineum• 4 years ago

There are generally two choices for immigrants to any country really. You either keep the spelling of your name or you (try to) keep the pronunciation.

These days I think the former is the standard but it definitely used to be the latter.

Then there's Nguyen. I don't understand.

Biganon2• 4 years ago

I read that with an almost sarcastic tone. I don't think the author thinks it's confusing, they're probably mocking the immigration officers who found them confusing and chose to simply erase them.

Nowadays, it would be considered disrespectful to call a language feature "confusing" (also it would sound dumb) so I don't think that's what the author is doing.

Semaphor• 4 years ago

Nowadays, it would be considered disrespectful to call a language feature "confusing" (also it would sound dumb)

I disagree. IMO "confusing" is not a value judgement. It’s simply confusing to any person who doesn’t know this accent. I for example would have no idea what the difference between č and c is. That does not mean I lack respect or that I’m dumb, that simply means I don’t know it. I’d expect someone who never encountered German Umlauts to be confused when they encounter Ö. Hell, I’d even expect someone who never saw Latin letters before to be confused about Latin letters.

Broken_Hippo4• 4 years ago

Unless you are exposed to the languages, no one realistically knows how to pronounce them.

I'm going to guess, however, that the real reason for dropping them was due to typewriters (and later computers) that simply don't have them as an option. You can't print punctuation and letters that you simply don't have access to. ö, ø, å, æ and the like get dropped as well.

Symbiote• 4 years ago

For the languages using Č etc, you probably also don't know how to pronounce C, W, V, etc.

At least writing Č shows it's different to C.

inglor_cz• 4 years ago

As of now, the longest vowel-less meaningful sentence in Czech is:

Škrt plch z mlh Brd pln skvrn z mrv prv hrd scvrnkl z brzd skrz trs chrp v krs vrb mls mrch srn čtvrthrst zrn.

The meaning of the sentence is:

Stingy dormouse from Brdy mountains fogs full of manure spots firstly proudly shrank a quarter of handful seeds, a delicacy for mean does, from brakes through bunch of Centaurea flowers into scrub of willows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Str%C4%8D_prst_skrz_krk

I just walked around Brdy yesterday, but I didn't meet any stingy dormouse. They must be rare.

adrian_b5• 4 years ago

In reality this sentence is not vowel-less.

It is vowel-less only from the perspective of the languages where "R" and "L" can be only consonants, i.e. they must always belong to syllables where another sound is the vowel (i.e. the peak of sonority).

In Czech and in many other present or past languages, including in the Proto-Indo-European, "R" and "L" can be both consonants and vowels, depending on the neighbour sounds.

While there are many languages where "R" and "L" cannot be vowels, in almost all languages "I" and "U" can be either vowels or consonants, also depending on their environment.

There are languages where even "E" and "O" can be consonants in certain environments, not only vowels. There are also languages where the nasal plosives or even some sibilants may be vowels, not only consonants.

In general, only "A" is always a vowel and only the non-nasal plosives are always only consonants.

For the other sounds of intermediate sonority, it varies from language to language whether they are used only as consonants or only as vowels, or they may be used as either consonants or vowels, depending on the environment.

dotancohen• 4 years ago

At my skill level in life, burgundy is red, Excel is witchcraft, and "Škrt plch z mlh..." is vowelless.

hnbad2• 4 years ago

You're conflating syllabic consonants and vowels. Phonetically, R and L are always consonants. The distinction between consonants and vowels is not in whether they can appear by themselves as syllables.

For example, in many English dialects "bottle" has two syllables and the second syllable is just an "L". But that L is still a consonant.

Asraelite5• 4 years ago

By nasal plosive do you mean nasal sonorants, [n] [m] etc. or do you mean something like [ⁿd]? "nasal plosive" sounds like an oxymoron to me.

ZeroGravitas• 4 years ago

As a European, when I think of stereotypical 'American' surnames, it's often the European ones that are not common near me that I think of, particularly Polish names ending in -ski and Italian names ending in -i.

I wonder if other areas in Europe do the same in reverse. (Though typing this out I realise that I grew up knowing a few people with a Polish and Italian surname that fits these patterns, so possibly that's why they stick out for me personally).

dvh• 4 years ago

Krc could be from Slovak "kŕč" - 1. muscle or stomach cramp, 2. Bulbous stem or root e.g. wine, 3. commanding verb to "duck" down

forehanddev3• 4 years ago

I'm not sure whether Srp is similar. The Serbian-language word for the Serbian language itself is Srpski (српски), but srp is also Slavic for “sickle”...

Native speaker here, these are in fact two different words, since the change that happens in the root of the word 'Srb' that converts it to 'Srp' when the suffix 'ski' is added is called Consonant voicing or originally 'Jednacenje suglasnika po zvucnosti'.

acadapter• 4 years ago

'Jednacenje suglasnika po zvucnosti'

"equalizaton of consonants on [the basis of] voicedness"

IvanK_net• 4 years ago

The letters R, L, M can create a syllable in the czech language, similar to vowels. All words in the article are single-syllable words.

The word "srp" in Czech is a "sickle" - a tool for harvesting wheat: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srp From that, you get "Srpen" - "August", which is a "month of harvesting crops" (same in Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, etc).

seanhunter• 4 years ago

The article mentions "Ng" as being Mandarin, but I know two people with the surname Ng who are both Vietnamese. Is this connected?

DonaldFisk2• 4 years ago

It says it's Cantonese, not Mandarin. There are many ethnic Chinese in Vietnam (Hoa), and many of them speak Cantonese or are descended from Cantonese speakers.

ogogmad• 4 years ago

I don't think truly vowel-less words can exist, unless the consonants can all be "held" like {rr, sh, th, zh, l}. If a consonant cannot be held, like {b, k, t, d}, then there has to be a vowel somewhere.

When I say "ng", I say it almost like "oong", so there's a starting vowel. I can say it with an ending vowel like "nga". I suppose the consonant "ng" can be held, but it's hard to say it without pronouncing a vowel somewhere.

Note: This opinion is not scientific.

Asraelite5• 4 years ago

I suppose the consonant "ng" can be held, but it's hard to say it without pronouncing a vowel somewhere.

It just takes a bit of practice. The surname Ng is pronounced without a vowel in Cantonese.

It's true that you can't really have a stop-only word in isolation, but they can still exist with other words depending on how you define what a word is.

You could consider "'d", the contracted form of "would", "had", or "did", to be a word in English. If you didn't, it would imply that "you'd", "I'd", "Mary'd" etc. must be words in their own right which is a bit ridiculous.

A good example in another language would be 't and 'k in Dutch, since they're also written with spaces separating them.

DonaldFisk2• 4 years ago

One problem with these names is that they are difficult to shout.

amelius• 4 years ago

吳 belongs to at least twenty-seven million people

Is it a coincidence that this glyph looks like a man, waving his hand?

est• 4 years ago

Is it a coincidence that this glyph looks like a man, waving his hand?

You are 99% close. It actually means a person speaks loudly with palm hand

https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E5%90%B4

zht• 4 years ago

wonder if it is a coincidence that it is more prevalent in cantonese speaking regions, where the dialect is far more tonal than mandarin due to its use of more tones

innermatrix• 4 years ago

The author appears to mostly randomly choose from a menu of Slavic options, both wrt etymology and geography. For example “smrt” means “death” across Slavic languages, yet Czech is randomly chosen to be mentioned in the article.

Similar problems with Croatia vs Serbia vs Yugoslavia are discussed in others’ comments.

retrac• 4 years ago

For example “smrt” means “death” across Slavic languages

Surely "Mr. Death" is a bit unusual in its own right?

PufPufPuf2• 4 years ago

There are 77 people called "Smrt" in the Czech republic: https://www.prijmeni.cz/Smrt

justsomehnguy• 4 years ago

After "Vagina" as both the toponym and the surname?

tiahura• 4 years ago

I’ve always wondered how Smrt became a name. Was old man Smrt an assassin?

hendrikrassmann• 4 years ago

Of course there are only 100 people named SMRT left. The other ones died.

BooneJS• 4 years ago

I've seen Srb in southern Wisconsin and Smrz in central Wisconsin (ironically including Plover, WI)

mjd3• 4 years ago

Plover, WI is on my list of places to visit. Maybe next summer! I am hoping to drive through there on the way to or from Neenah to see the foundry.

rg111• 4 years ago

The doctor who is mentioned does likely belong to the Parsi community of India.

The Parsis came from Iran to India to flee Islamic persecution. And they are among the "model minorities" in India.

There are many famous people with occupational last names. But I don’t know why. Did they not have last names originally?

Last name convention in India varies wildly. Bengalis, Marathis, Hindustanis go with the family last name. Many Muslims do not. They can choose among Ali, Sheikh, Mian, etc. South Indians often put their father's name as last name.

Did Parsis have none? I wonder.

Farokh Engineer [0] was a famous Indian cricketer.

I have even heard of names like Daruwala (seller of alcohol), Screwwala (screws), etc. IRL.

The wildest one that I have heard is SodaBottleOpenerWala [1]. Wala just means "having". So a seller of X would be X-wala [1a].

The Parsis are a influential minority who enjoy a good perception from the population. Homi Bhaba, FRS [2] was the father of Indian Nuclear Science. Sam Maneckshaw [3] was a legendary Field Marshal who helped liberate Bangladesh from Pakistan. Ratan Tata is the leader of Tata Group in India. They own Jaguar Land Rover brand.

Parsis were, and still somewhat are in prominent positions of Bollywood, science, military, and definitely industry.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farokh_Engineer

[1] https://www.sodabottleopenerwala.in/food/the-story-behind-wa...

[1a]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallah

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homi_J._Bhabha

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Manekshaw

seventytwo• 4 years ago

All this without discussion of how they’re pronounced?!

PufPufPuf2• 4 years ago

For the Czech ones, you can just use Google translate, it reads Czech pretty well.

gondo• 4 years ago

`Vlk` is also a Slovak word with the same meaning: "wolf"

tamaharbor• 4 years ago

F u cn rd ths, u cn bcm a sec & gt a gd jb w hi pa.

U.S. Surnames with No Vowels

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