Greetings all. I just stumbled into your soup bowl and Joshua graciously let me swim around for a while here.
It occurred to me that it ain't easy to say "phở." I realized this when I saw Xeni's post on BoingBoing:
A Vietnamese-American software developer pal once tried to teach me how to say the word properly -- most Americans butcher the word into something that sounds like foe. He told me, "Just say 'fuck' without the 'ck,' but try sort of curl your voice up in pitch and tone a bit at the end." I never got the phonics right, but I still dig the phở.
This got a response:
BoingBoing reader John Horner says, "Whoever told you how to pronounce pho was making it all too difficult. The comma stuck in the side of the O makes it an ur sound and the question mark above it means it's pronounced as a question: "fur?". Imagine yourself as an animal rights activist presented with a fur coat. My wife is Vietnamese, if that helps, and Vietnamese is a bit of a mess orthographically because it was translated from Chinese ideograms into French by a Portuguese guy.
Best of all would be if someone were able to make or find an MP3 file of a Vietnamese speaker saying the word. Does anyone out there have such a thing? Can anyone out there make it?
