One of our in-state beers of Pennsylvania is the much beloved Yuengling, which despite the spelling with the “u” is pronounced /jɪŋlɪŋ/ or “ying-ling.” Obviously the exotic “ue” spelling is a clue that Yuengling did not start out as a native word.
Sure enough, if you head over to the Yuengling brewery site, you will find the explanation that it’s orignally German for “young man”, now spelled as Jüngling ‘youth or youngling’. In the semi-nativized spelling, the “ue” represents the sound /ü/ (or IPA /y/) which is a front-round vowel also found in French. To pronounce /ü/, say /i/ (or “ee”) and round your lips. It should sound a little different from the back rounded vowel /u/.
The next obvious step is that English speakers “fixed” the exotic /ü/ to a sound found in English, namely /i/. The odd thing is that normally, /ü/ is changed to /u/, not /i/. For instance the French expression déjà vu [deʒa vü] is normally pronounced as [deʒa vu] in English not [deʒa vi] (i.e. not “deja vee”).
So why not [juŋlɪŋ] for Yuengling? I’m speculating here, but I think the reason is the [ŋ] “ng” in the first syllable. English does not generally allow [u] or [ʊ] before [ŋ]. That is, you won’t find many “oong” [uŋ] words while “ing”, “ang” and “ong” words are much more common.
The only “oong” word I found in the Oxford English Dictionary was the Australian slang word boong (borrowed from a local aboriginal language). The only other one I know is Star Trek warlord Khan Noonian Soong, but that is meant to be an “Asian name” (and it does exist in Chinese as in Soong Mei Ling, Madam Chang Kai-Shek). Therefore I think it is valid to conclude that English did not favor [uŋ] clusters.
FYI – There are “ung” words, but they are actually pronounced [ʌŋ].
When the pronunciation of Yuengling was being nativized a few centuries ago, I think the normal change of [ü] to [u] was rejected because you would have gotten another disfavored cluster [uŋ], so the only alternate left was to change [ü] to [i].
Interestingly, we do not have names like Carl Jung [juŋ]. It would be interesting to see what would happen to Jüngling today, but in the meantime, the pronunciation of Yuengling has become fixed as “ying ling”…and there’s no going back in this case.