Tuesday, October 29, 2013
My Last Name
I've lived in America for over 10 years and I've only met a handful of people who can pronounce my last name, Nguyen. The American pronunciation is "win", while the actual pronunciation is completely different (I don't know how to sound it out via word). It's estimated that about 40% of Vietnamese people have this last name, making Nguyen the most common surname among Vietnamese people. I was curious as to what my last name actually means, so I did a little research on it. It turns out that Nguyen is the name of a royal dynasty- the Nguyen Dynasty, which was the last ruling family of Vietnam. During its rule, this Dynasty awarded many people with the last name Nguyen. Also, many criminals during the time changed their last names to Nguyen in order to avoid prosecution. For these reasons, Nguyen became an extremely popular surname. The etymology of Nguyen is vague. The name is derived from a similar Chinese surname, and the name is believed to mean "original" or "first," but it's unclear whether this is actually true or not. If my surname does mean that, I can only imagine how it came to be. Was Nguyen the first surname in Southeast Asia? Who knows. But even if I don't know what my last name means, it still connects me to millions of people worldwide, and that's pretty sweet.
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It's interesting that 40% of an entire country's population share a single last name and the way in which this came to be is also quite fascinating. I guess it's pretty cool to know the etymology of your last name. The only thing I know about my last name is that I share it with the bad guy from Die Hard.
ReplyDeleteI know a lot of people always mess up your last name but I had no idea that it was such a popular name. I mean 40% of the entire Vietnamese population shares the name which is really cool! The history behind your name saying that it came from the Nguyen Dynasty was also very interesting in itself. I guess it makes sense why the name became so popular. I never wondered where my last name came from but now I am interested to find out the etymology behind it.
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