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Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by ivewonyoung on Thursday November 12, 2026 @11:58PM (#50478541)
You mean like John Smith and Jane Smith? About as common.
Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by wormius on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:39AM (#50478821)
I've heard that many of the asian names that have "ng" in them derive from the same root: Hong, Hung, Huang, Ang, Ng, Ngo(?) etc... I feel like I'm missing a few. But yeah. You'll see a lot of names like this.

Just found this on wiki -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ng_(name) : "Ng (pronounced [ŋ̍]) is the simplified (tone-less) romanization of the Cantonese surnames 吳/吴 (Jyutping: Ng4, read in Mandarin as pinyin: Wú) and 伍 (Ng5, Mandarin Wǔ); and also of the Hokkien surnames 黃/黄 (Pe̍h-ōe-jī: N̂ɡ, Mandarin Huáng) and 阮 (Ńg, Mandarin Ruǎn).

The surname is often pronounced in English as /əŋ/ əng or /ɪŋ/ ing or /ɛŋ/ eng. It is sometimes romanized as Ang, Eng, Ing and Ong in the United States, and as Ung in Australia. In Cambodia, the corresponding surname is Oeng."

Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by anakaine on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:57AM (#50478921)
The non standard English chara ters really help articulate to the average person how it should sound. Clear as mud.
Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by numpad0 on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:44AM (#50479297)
[delayed]
Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by konart on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:13AM (#50480023)
>But at least it's not like Russian, which apparently uses more and rarer frequency bands - think DTMF

As a russian I need some explanation here.

Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by somenameforme on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:27AM (#50480141)
I think he was just, somewhat dramatically, referring to tones in Chinese and ы in Russian. Neither of which being what makes their respective languages particularly difficult.
Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by numpad0 on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:41AM (#50480255)
[delayed]
Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by alboy on Friday November 13, 2026 @07:12AM (#50482410)
> Allegedly you guys use the widest range of frequencies for vocalization which is advantageous in acquiring foreign languages.

That sounds like your are remembering one of those Tomatis's charts, which are simply bullshit. All natural languages are quite similar in terms of their "frequency bands", what is different is the clustering of their phonemes within those bands, e.g. Russian has lots of consonant sounds but very few vowels when compared to English.

Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by somenameforme on Friday November 13, 2026 @10:54AM (#50485356)
I assume you know this, but Chinese is a tonal language. 'Mom scolds the horse' translates as ma ma ma ma. With nothing but tones distinguishing the various 'ma's. People who grew up with only tonal or non-tonal languages tend to do poorly with languages on the other side because they're extremely alien.

Like imagine not being able to use inflections to express emotion when speaking. That'd sound as alien to a non-tonal speaker as the concept of using inflections to express emotion to a tonal-speaker. Like think about how 'That's a great idea.' can be phrased in different tones to make it sound enthusiastic, insulting, a question, sarcastic, and so forth. You just can't do that in tonal languages.

There's also the side issue that most non-tonal languages tend to have a relatively close linguistic background. Russian has a massive amount of 'English' cognates (often from shared ancestors predating both), especially if you consider words that are basically cognates but have different stresses or maybe one slightly different vowel sound or whatever. But the number of cognates between tonal and non-tonal languages is far fewer. It makes them much more difficult to learn, at least for me.

Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by sls on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:39PM (#50489323)
> Like think about how 'That's a great idea.' can be phrased in different tones to make it sound enthusiastic, insulting, a question, sarcastic, and so forth. You just can't do that in tonal languages.

You certainly can. Just because a morpheme has a tone doesn't mean that there aren't other contributors to pitch, such as sentence pitch contour. Do you actually speak or understand any tonal languages? I can assure you that Chinese people definitely use sentence prosody to convey extremely subtle nuances of meaning.

Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by thaumasiotes on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:43AM (#50481527)
> The non standard English chara ters really help articulate to the average person how it should sound. Clear as mud.

I don't really understand your complaint. If you want to know how something is pronounced, you'll have to learn how to read pronunciation information. If you want nothing but standard English, then it won't be possible to describe the pronunciation of most foreign words. (For example, no English syllable corresponds to Spanish no - the problems start very early if you try to go this route.)

Are you looking for information, or not?

Re:Nvidia employees petition to bring back Jensen Huang by pasquinelli on Friday November 13, 2026 @07:55AM (#50482836)
> You mean like John Smith and Jane Smith? About as common.

okay, but if a man named john smith had an affair with a woman named jane smith it would be a funny coincidence the same. do you have a point?