Phnom Penh pronunciation

 Whenever I pronounce Phnom Penh without the initial |p| sound, I get corrected, but I am understood, and it is a nuisance for an English speaker.

Yes—and I can see why that would be irritating. English speakers naturally tend to treat the initial P in Phnom as silent because “ph” normally represents /f/ in English, as in phone and photograph. So Phnom Penh looks as though it ought to begin something like “nom.”

But in Khmer, ភ្នំពេញ (Phnom Penh) really does have an initial consonant corresponding roughly to p. The “ph” in the conventional Romanization isn't the English ph digraph; it's representing an aspirated p sound. In other words, it's closer to p-nom than nom.

Phnom Penh (p-nom pen)

And there's an interesting linguistic irony here: English speakers who say “nom Penh” are actually following English spelling conventions quite reasonably, while Cambodians hear the missing initial consonant immediately. So you're understood because the place is unmistakable, but you're being corrected because you're using an English reading of a non-English romanization.

I'd probably regard it as one of those cases where communication and local pronunciation are two different standards. If everyone knows what you mean, the missing /p/ isn't accomplishing much communicatively—but if you want to sound local, unfortunately, the little /p/ has to earn its keep.

Pneumonia 

Exactly! Pneumonia is the perfect English example. We pronounce it “new-MOH-nee-uh,” with the p completely silent.

So an English speaker seeing Phnom quite naturally thinks, “Oh, another Greek-derived word beginning with an odd consonant cluster; the p must be silent.”

But Phnom isn't behaving according to English orthography. The ph is being used to represent an aspirated p, approximately [pʰ]. So Khmer Phnom Penh is roughly “pʰnom pen”, whereas English orthographic instinct gives you “nom pen.”

And there is an additional annoyance: English speakers aren't even being inconsistent when they do this. We have pneumonia, psychology, pneumatic, Ptolemy and so forth, where an initial p really is silent.

So I'd say the correction is linguistically justified but psychologically unfair. 😄

Thais do the same thing: Phuket

Yes! Phuket is another excellent trap, although the mechanism is slightly different.

In Thai, ภูเก็ต (Phuket) begins with an aspirated p sound, roughly [pʰ]. The Romanization Ph- is again not the English ph = /f/. So the Thai pronunciation is approximately “Poo-ket”, not “Foo-ket.”

English speakers are almost irresistibly drawn toward the latter because ph overwhelmingly means /f/ in English.

What's amusing is that the problem goes in both directions. English speakers look at Phnom and Phuket and apply English spelling rules; Cambodians and Thais look at the same letters and expect their own romanization conventions to be understood. Neither side is being irrational—the Latin alphabet is simply being asked to represent sounds for which English has already given some letters rather different jobs.

And Phuket has the additional advantage that “Foo-ket” sounds so much like an English obscenity that English speakers are particularly eager to get it right. 😄