Pho is a popular Vietnamese soup. It is usually made with beef bone stock, spices, noodles, and thin pieces of beef or chicken. English speakers often say its name incorrectly. The same thing happens with food names such as the Greek dish gyros and the Italian dish gnocchi.
In Vietnamese, the word pho can also have a narrower meaning. It may refer to the noodles themselves, rather than the whole bowl of soup. Other words are often added to show which type of pho someone means. So how should the name of this popular dish be pronounced?
Some people pronounce pho like "foe." However, the correct pronunciation is closer to "fuh," with a short u sound. One reason for this common mistake is that Vietnamese uses tones, while English does not. In a tone language, the same group of sounds can have different meanings depending on whether the voice rises or falls.
Vietnamese uses several tones for its vowels, and changing the tone can completely change a word's meaning. For example, the sound written as "ma" in English can have six different meanings in Vietnamese. The meaning depends on the marks used in words such as ma, má, mà, mả, mã, and mạ.
The word is also spelled differently in the two languages. In Vietnamese, it is written as "phở." In English, it is usually written as "pho," without the special marks. This English spelling first began appearing in print around 1935.
The small mark above the "o" helps Vietnamese speakers know which tone to use. It is called "dấu hỏi," which means "hook above" in English. When English leaves out this mark, part of the pronunciation information disappears too.
The difference between "pho" and "phở" shows why food names from other languages can be difficult to pronounce. English spelling may make them easier to type, but it does not always tell us how the original word should sound.