"Hey there, ching-chong.. you name's smith now! Deal with it."

Friendly people.

My friend's new roommate is from Beijing. His name is Bohao, but it was decided (I'm not certain by who) that his American name should be Albert. Because, damnit, we just can't deal with that shit!

Fuck that - Bohao is an awesome name.

>> ^gwiz665:
"Hey there, ching-chong.. you name's smith now! Deal with it."

Name one Asian you've ever met named Ching-Chong, you racist bastard.

This depresses me. I think I'm going to walk off a mountain now.

Am I alone in that I'd rather call a man named "Hai" his real name, rather than "Robert, "Roger", or "Christopher"?

Face it, once you've been told how to pronounce it at least close to properly, foreign names just plain sound cooler....especially when attached to someone whose family is from said place.

I agree, never let someone make you change your name, be proud of the cultural spelling. Exchange students are often encouraged to change their names as well. I have a friend with an exchange student from Korea, who has also chosen a western name for his stay while he is here. I think it was his family back home who encouraged it. I expect the exchange program encouraged it though. We tried to use his real name but he insisted we use his new name.

On another note...,
My dad's dad, (my grandpa - Opa in German) had the name Leonardt. I never met him. He never made it out of Germany/Poland in WW2 but I was named after him. My parents made the decision to change the spelling to a more "Canadian" (phonetic) spelling.
Lenard – this way no one could incorrectly call me “Leo.” The 'O' was silent in the english translation. I shortened it to Len around grade seven after I got tired of being called names like Leonard Nimoy and Lynnerd-Skinnerd, I have often considered having my name changed back to the original spelling of Leonardt.

We are the United States of Borg, resistance is futile.

You will be assimilated.

Your culture will adapt to service ours.

I reckon.

How about they change their name if they're sick of the ignorant American assholes mispronouncing it after 3 years of working with them oooooooooooorrrrrrrrrr they keep it because it is a part of them that they could never get rid of despite all of the ignorant American fuckers.

Now as far as the driving goes...let's work on that.

I know we have the wtf channel, but maybe we need a wingnut channel too. (includes all creationists by default)

Coming from a person whose last name is the color of shit. Go figure.

In French class they wanted us to change our names into French ones. I refused. It's a stupid idea in any setting.

Can I just ask how fucking LAZY do you have to be that you can't learn to pronounce a word correctly?

And this is an elected official?

I hope people are still reading this.

I work in an English-only preschool in Taiwan, which gives me some authority on this subject. Here's the deal, you may think this practice is racist, but you're not seeing the big picture about names. First names like BoHao and JingMing (my Chinese name) aren't pronounced the way you're now thinking them in your head. They're not. Try all you want, and you will never pronounce it correctly unless you're a Chinese speaker and understand what tonality is. When Chinese people emigrate to English speaking countries, they mostly take English names because English speakers will either: a) make a big deal out of trying to learn the exact pronunciation of their Chinese names, which they never will do because they don't understand the rules; or b) butcher the name to such a degree that the person will be embarrassed, annoyed or otherwise put out. Furthermore, people almost always already have an English name, given during high school to use during widespread mandatory English classes, if not earlier (as in my three-year-old students' cases). English naming of Chinese people isn't racist, it makes natural sense. Names are a way of easily referring to an individual--that's why we have them anthropologically speaking. That's why people often insist you call them by their English names.

All that said, a law requiring renaming or an agency outside the family or the individual him/herself generating these names is, of course, racist. I'm not arguing that anything like that is acceptable. I'm saying that you can't just learn how to pronounce Chinese names (or Polish or Serbian for that matter) by reading them or mimicking what you think you're hearing. Many languages have distinctions that speakers of other languages just cannot hear or create with their mouths. People don't just get English names because they want/have to be more Western. They don't. Really. They do it because that's what the want to be called.

Thank you for an insightful comment, RhesusMonk. For the most part I agree with you.

Still... (and I know I will probably be considered terribly arrogant in saying this, since I will, of course, be using myself as an example, but-) I wouldn't say it's impossible (not even _hard_ for that matter) to pick up the majority of languages' pronunciation rules that exist around the world, really.

OK, me then.
My native language is Indo-European, and I also know English really well, while my German and Russian are average. I've frequented Scandinavia a bit, but enough so that I could distinguish between Finnish, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian when I hear them spoken most of the time. Icelandic too (for example I'm not one of the folks that think Sigur Ros' lyrics are in Icelandic, hee hee). Furthermore, while I was researching funny English accents a couple of years ago, I got into French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish a bit, whereas I'd probably attribute my Portuguese skills to all the Brazilian porn I've been watching natural talent. Anyway, these language skills enable me to accurately pronounce pretty much any name of European/Slavic/Latin descent I'd encounter in writing, ever.

Also, my wife studied Chinese and Japanese and some of her knowledge rubbed off on me. I've also watched a lot of Korean movies/TV to now be able to distinguish their language/names/pronunciation also.

In conclusion, the only continent that I'd probably offend trying to pronounce their culturally native names is Africa. Then again I think most people know how many African kids are being given English names these days...

P.S. And I'm only 21.

Bro! I actually did know a girl whose last name was Chingchong, back in highschool. I know, eh??

She rear-ended me once, too, miles from school and completely random. Crushed the bumper in on my parents' '87 Plymouth Sundance and then all she could say was "I'm so burned" over and over again.


>> ^blankfist:
>> ^gwiz665:
"Hey there, ching-chong.. you name's smith now! Deal with it."
Name one Asian you've ever met named Ching-Chong, you racist bastard.

Did you pleasure yourself while writing that, EDD?

PS. Even Rush Limbaugh could tell the difference between Finnish and Swedish/Danish/Norwegian. The former is a Finno-Ugric language, completely different from almost every other European language. Just sayin

I once called my maid Ling Bao, when her name was actually Kenny Michaels. She was so pissed off until I threatened to fire her. Damn Mexicans.

*nochannel *asia *wtf *politics

>> ^BreaksTheEarth:
In French class they wanted us to change our names into French ones. I refused. It's a stupid idea in any setting.


Another fun example of this: at Chinese classes here at Princeton, the teachers make all the students go by Chinese names that they assign to them, while in Japanese class they just pronounce your name in a Japanese-ified way (much like we change the pronunciation for foreign names in America). I guess the Chinese are a bunch of racist pricks too, or maybe Zhoulaoshi was just a dick.

The average Chinese cannot pronounce many, many of the English morphemes. Anecdotal evidence is useless in the conversation. We're talking about a best-fit line situation including all the members of linguistic groups, most of whom don't have a Babelfish stuck in their ears. It's not broad-minded to think that changing your name or modifying it to make it easier for the target culture to say is stupid, racist, etc. Just because you sometimes care enough to practice and learn doesn't mean that it happens globally enough to make it worthwhile to keep a difficult-to-pronounce name.

And to those with linguistic ability: do you really think that an increased capacity for polyglot-ism is the norm? I think if you truly understood your talents, you would see that you are different.

Ooh, story time!! I was born in Texas into a family that came from China. Most of my friends growing up were either white or Latino, so I wasn't very Chinese except in the eyes of non-Chinese people. I moved to San Francisco about 5 years ago and took some Cantonese classes in the hopes that I could learn to speak to my grandma finally. Because of this, and the fact that my Mandarin-speaking dad was far away in China, for one semester or two, I decided to stop using my "white" name of Jerry and use my Mandarin Chinese name of Shih-Chieh. The results were interesting. Many whites and others reacted positively to the name, saying "hey that's a cool name", especially when they found out that it basically means "the world's hero." Other whites seemed to get upset that I wasn't using "Jerry". I asked one of my teachers to call me Shih-Chieh and she got upset, refused and called me Jerry for the rest of the semester. A couple other white students seemed to support that decision. But the second teacher of that class was also white and was like "hey, that's a cool name!"

Speech class was cooler.. we had to introduce ourselves in the beginning of class, and so everyone was forced to say everyone's name until they knew it. I didn't get any probs there. Anyway, what was interesting is that it seemed like other Chinese Americans were less happy about my using my Chinese name, than non-Chinese. Lotsa Chinese Americans (US born ones anyway) seemed reluctant to call me by my Chinese name. I think it brought up issues of assimilation. Are you supposed to be proud of your culture, or seek to destroy it and assimilate into white culture? How far can that take you? Will you have an easier life if you mimic whites? Most Chinese Americans will answer yes to that last one with little doubt. There's also a lot of issues about "self-hate". Some data suggests that the average Chinese person has 1/20th the wealth the average white American has. Living in one of the most capitalist nations on earth, where the wealth of someone is very much an indicator of status, it's hard to be proud of one's Chinese-ness if "Chinese" is synonymous with extremely poor.

Another story..My mom also told me how when she was working minimum wage in Texas, blacks and Latino coworkers would sometimes ask her for her Chinese name, so they could call her by that. For them it was an issue of pride, and her white name was probably seen as selling out.

In the end, I reverted back to "Jerry", but still have some friends who call me Shih-Chieh. Am I selling out for using Jerry again? Probably. But I was never really a part of Chinese culture to begin with, and I've been unemployed for so long that even if there's only a 5% chance of an employer somehow discriminating against my name when they see my resume, I'd rather not take that chance. I gotta eat, dammit.

BreakstheEarth, ironically the very words "China" and "Chinese", along with hundreds of other words English has come up with, are ways of calling people things they don't call themselves. In the popular languages of China, the country is not called "China" or anything remotely resembling that word. Every language has a billion names for other places and people that aren't used by those people to refer to themselves. Personally I think this system is pretty inefficient. Imagine if Barack Obama was had ten thousand different names, when the world could just use the one he used himself: Barack Obama!

RhesusMonk, I think a LOT of Chinese people do in fact want to be more like white people, or at least be more marketable to white business interests (not "Western", as that would include blacks, Latinos, etc. too). We don't adopt black or Latino names, we adopt white ones. If black Americans had most of the world's wealth, we'd adopt black names. It's nice of you to think that there's no self-inflicted racism going on here, but there really is.

>> ^RhesusMonk:
And to those with linguistic ability: do you really think that an increased capacity for polyglot-ism is the norm? I think if you truly understood your talents, you would see that you are different.


I honestly think I'm rubbish at languages in general, because if that weren't the case, I'd be speaking perfect German and Russian by now. English is the only foreign language I've picked up really well - I'm not sure why. But like I said, the reason for me being able to discern the pronunciations is that I've had a couple of multi-cultural experiences; that's it. I'm definitely not linguistically-gifted.

>> ^RhesusMonk:
The average Chinese cannot pronounce many, many of the English morphemes. Anecdotal evidence is useless in the conversation. We're talking about a best-fit line situation including all the members of linguistic groups, most of whom don't have a Babelfish stuck in their ears. It's not broad-minded to think that changing your name or modifying it to make it easier for the target culture to say is stupid, racist, etc. Just because you sometimes care enough to practice and learn doesn't mean that it happens globally enough to make it worthwhile to keep a difficult-to-pronounce name.
And to those with linguistic ability: do you really think that an increased capacity for polyglot-ism is the norm? I think if you truly understood your talents, you would see that you are different.


The ability to learn and pronounce foreign languages runs in my family to an extent, most people in my immediate family have studied a foreign language or two to varying degrees of success, and there has been at least one person per generation to reach a fluent level of pronunciation and near-fluent speaking level of a foreign language for the past several generations. I'm aware that some people simply aren't able to learn new sounds.

That said, I would rather somebody use an adaptation of my name (for example, Raisu in Japanese instead of Rice in English) than assign me an entirely new foreign-language "name" that is not my own. I think that a person's name is very important to them for most people, beyond the strictly utilitarian definition of being a convenient way for them to be referred to.

Used to have a lot of chinese mates at college and they all used english names for us, but if a guy didn't want to use it, he'd at least appreciate me trying to get it, then tell me to call him some easier form of it for short.

I think they just got allowed to call themselves ANYTHING they liked. They probably had record somewhere, but even teachers called this one guy "bruce", cos he called himself "bruce lee". We had "jackie chan" too. No joke.

It's a really stupid lawmaker who speaks publically about making it mandatory.

(Edit: hahah.. i accidentally typo'd the first word 'have' into 'hate'..)

I, for one, am for Texas becoming it's own country. We can send all the right-wing extremists there and they can come up with as much insane bullshit as they want.

His name was Ching-Chong...

>> ^blankfist:
>> ^gwiz665:
"Hey there, ching-chong.. you name's smith now! Deal with it."
Name one Asian you've ever met named Ching-Chong, you racist bastard.

>> ^ponceleon:
I, for one, am for Texas becoming it's own country. We can send all the right-wing extremists there and they can come up with as much insane bullshit as they want.


Can we send all rabid Liberals into Nunavut so they can have their own frozen wasteland to rule over? See easy to reply to an equally bat shit statement by someone. Personally anytime a politician of any stripe starts pandering like mad to anyone, I start wondering why. And exactly what are they trying to gain from it.

Personally I look at this, and happily see that plenty of people haven't quite figured out that whole cultural pluralism thing. It's still kicking them in the ass, and wholly believe that their view is the only correct one in the world. That applies to your nuts on the left and the right.

Anyone else have the experience of knowing native Chinese or Taiwanese folks who were given kinda weird English names?

I know a Saul, an Edmond, a Sonia,...