How On Earth Do You Pronounce “Ngerng”?!

As we all know, Roy Ngerng is a well-known (and some would argue, ‘infamous’) local blogger and activist who has been fighting for many causes, most notably his controversial stance against the Central Provident Fund (CPF) scheme.

Well, politics aside, there seems to be quite a number of netizens who were curious about Ngerng, or rather, “Ngerng”:

Like any young Chinese Singaporean who have ever tried to consult the Internet to clarify “just what on earth does that ‘dialect’ word mean”, we have reached the sad consensus that there is unfortunately very little resources online for southern Chinese topolects. But still, back to the question.

How on earth do you pronounce “Ngerng”!?

The two most important pieces of information that we need to have in order to pronounce names like these properly, are 1) the Chinese character(s) in question and 2) which topolect were they transliterated in.

Some readers may remember encountering Roy’s Chinese name in the news: “鄞義林”, or “Yín Yìlín” in Mandarin. Maybe there are some of you out there who share my weird hobby of trying to find out someone’s ‘dialect’ group from his/her name. But disappointingly, the Chinese part of Roy’s name was transliterated as “Ngerng Yi Ling”, which provides no other clues since the personal name is most likely transliterated using Mandarin (with a local accent).

This means that unfortunately, we will have to manually search the Chinese surname “鄞” in the different dictionaries to find out which ‘dialect’ “Ngerng” is… So here we go!

hokkien:

For Hokkien, I checked the Hokkien Wiktionary, and under here, I found this:

And to double check, I searched “鄞” on the 當代泉州音字彙, a dictionary for Tsuantsiu Hokkien (the Northern variant):

The Tong-tāi (that’s what I call the dictionary for short, after its first two words “當代”) uses a different romanisation system which is closer to Pinyin, but converting it into Tailo (the Taiwanese Romanisation system, which will be mentioned very frequently in the future, so take note!), we arrive at the conclusion that “鄞” is pronounced as “Gûn” in Tsuantsiu Hokkien, which is not quite the same as “Ngerng”.

“But what about Tsiangtsiu Hokkien (the Southern variant)?”

I cannot seem to find a Tsiangtsiu Hokkien dictionary online, unfortunately. But then, since “鄞” shares the same pronunciation as “銀”, let us check the entry for “銀” on the Taiwanese Hokkien Dictionary:

We arrive at the conclusion that “鄞” is pronounced “Gîrn/Gûn” in Tsuantsiu Hokkien but “Gîn” in Tsiangtsiu Hokkien. However, since neither pronunciation match “Ngerng”, so let’s move on to Teochew.

Teochew:

There are fewer resources online for Teochew as compared to Hokkien, but fortunately this website does give the Teochew pronunciation of words. Indeed, a search for the word “鄞” gave me this:

Jackpot! We find that in Teochew, “鄞” is pronounced “Ngêrng” in Teochew (converting it into Tailo). It seems quite plausible that Roy’s surname is meant to be read in Teochew.

Just to confirm, I checked the Cantonese pronunciation (“ngan4” in Jyutping) and the Hakka pronunciation (“ngiun2”), neither of which matches the rather unusual surname’s pronunciation in question.

Hence, we can safely conclude that “Ngerng” is pronounced /ŋəŋ/:

“ŋ”: as in “ngóo-hiong” (the food);
“ə”: as in how a Singaporean would pronounce “blogger“;
“ŋ”: as in “ngóo-hiong” (again!)