DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: kimba1 on July 24, 2008, 08:26:34 PM
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http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NEW_ZEALAND_BIZARRE_NAMES?SITE=TXDAM (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NEW_ZEALAND_BIZARRE_NAMES?SITE=TXDAM)
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Did they do this because they are mean, or just because they are stupid?
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I think stupid
I meant mean in a thoughtless way.
I know quite afew people who names thier kids with no idea of the impact it will have.
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I have observed that the great majority of Black people believe that the US is a racist country, and few believe that racism will end soon.
But still, they choose to name their children names that only Black people have: LaToya, Sheniqwa, Tyrone, Antwan, and even worse, Muslim names even though the parents are not Muslim: Rasool, Alia, Tareek.
If we assume that thee children will seek to be hired by White people (and the odds are that this will be true: there are far more Whites than Blacks, and more Human Resources people in industry are White than Black in a proportion greater than this), then giving their kids these names is an automatic handicap.
If we assume that the HR person is to some degree racist, he is more likely to eliminate Sheniqwa and Rasool from the short list that will be called for interviews. It is likely that the HR person simply finds interviewing people with pierced noses, braided hair, dreds, and do-rags uncomfortable. But the result is the same: no interview, no job for sure.
It is rarely the case that these names are ancient family names, which are more often George, James, Mary, Linda and such.
I suppose that if you really wanted to get your son or daughter that chance for an interview, you could name them Thomas Lee or Dixie Lee, Billy-Bob or Caitlan.
I would not presume and have never presumed to tell anyone what to name their kids, but as I see it, it can be most important, as it's the first thing that anyone knows about you when they meet you.
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I kinda doubt dixie-lee or billy-bob is helpful on the resume .
my real name is gee gawk ying,but I go by the name peter not because I`m ashame.
just nobody can say it right or even spell it.
but it`s not just a ethnic thing.
nordic names are not exactly popular here also
how many people do we know go by the name sjorgson
and that`s the easier spelling name
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I kinda doubt dixie-lee or billy-bob is helpful on the resume .
my real name is gee gawk ying,but I go by the name peter not because I`m ashame.
just nobody can say it right or even spell it.
but it`s not just a ethnic thing.
nordic names are not exactly popular here also
how many people do we know go by the name sjorgson
and that`s the easier spelling name
Dixie Lee or Billy Bob would be perfectly acceptable in the southeast, while Nordic names would be perfectly acceptable in the upper midwest.
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Dixie Lee and Joe Bob are clearly not the names of Black Americans. Dixie being the Confederate national anthem, and Lee being Robert E Lee, the Confederacy's best-known general. I doubt that many Black people would be named Beauregard or Nathan Bedford Forrest, Sterling Price, or Quantrill, either.
A name like Jeb Stuart Washington could really baffle the Hell out of them.
I am sure that there are White people named Washington, but I have yet to meet one. The Father of this country was not prolific.
Chinese names do not actually sound like names to Westerners. Some of them sound like noises made by machinery or caused by gastric distress. No offense.
Then there is the spelling problem. Mao T'se Tung (now it's Mao Zedong) sounds like Mousey Dung. There are two ways to write Chinese with the Roman alphabet, and both are deceptive and rather close to useless as a language learning aid.
And then there is the tone problem. Chinese (at least Mandarin and Cantonese) has four tones, and there is no way to write these in English. I think the French figured out a way of writing them in Vietnamese, with a ton of diacritical marks. That is little help to someone learning Chinese.
My friend Ying tells me that the surname Ng is pronounced "Wu". I am not sure how that works, but he speaks Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Min (or whatever the language of Fukien is), and surely knows more than I do.
Still, I do not see how Ng could be related to anything that sounds like Wu.
There is also the surname "Wu", spelled "Wu", or "Woo".
I would prefer any surname to Lipshitz.
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Dixie Lee or Billy Bob would be perfectly acceptable in the southeast, while Nordic names would be perfectly acceptable in the upper midwest.
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The point is that Black people are never named Dixie Lee, Caitlan, Billy Bob. I never met a Black Bjorn, Lars, or Anders, either.
I think that names such as Keisha, Shaneqwa, Leroy and Tyree are so stereotypical that they could be a handicap to the person that has them.
There is no reason why a Michael Ross would be less Jewish than a Schlomo Goldblatt, or a Lars Thorwaldsen would be more Scandinavian than a Tom Anderson, but this is nonetheless the way it sounds.
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the upper midwest has names like Guðrún María Bjarnadóttir ???
actually I can totally understand ng sounding like wu
the cantonese word for me is ngoi but to a westerner it sounds like loi
correction cantonese has 7 tones
but I only know how to explain the four mandarin tones -,/,\,~
the keyboard can`t cover my language
and i got doubts westerners can pronounce nordic words.
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and i got doubts westerners can pronounce nordic words.
The Norse are westerners. Are you saying they can't pronounce their own language?
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i caught that when i typed but it went before i could stop it
I meant most americans would not be able say those words.
I`ve heard a few easy words like sven of course
but had no idea the it would be common in the midwest
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but had no idea the it would be common in the midwest
You see more Swedish and Norwegian flags in Minnesota than US flags.
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The difficulty with Nordic languages is the way that the sounds are represented by the Roman alphabet, which are often different than these sounds as represented in English. There are a few vowels that are tough to get right, as well as a few consonants that occur in combinations unknown or rare in English.
The inflection of sentences also differs quite a bit, and as always, the only way to deal with tones and inflections is to listen and repeat, over and over.
When I lived in Grays Harbor County, in Washington State, kids thought it was a hoot to get their Norwegian grandparents to count from 1000 up, because of the singsong inflection of Norwegian when counting.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtvbfU-Yipc&feature=related (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtvbfU-Yipc&feature=related)
I failed
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I'm surprised J-Lo had a problem - anyone that speaks Spanish as a native tongue shouldn't have too many problems with Norwegian pronunciation. A native English speaker (especially an American English speaker) I can see - we don't use nearly as many sounds as most European languages.
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I was surprised she had difficulty with this, too.
For your information, Standard American Broadcast English has 39 different phonemes.
BBC Broadcast English has 44. Some English speakers use as many as 49.
This is part of the reason why the 26 character Roman alphabet is inadequate to spell English, making it difficult to spell.
Standard Peninsular Spanish has 23 phonemes. Latin American Broadcast Spanish has 21.
No one who speaks Spanish has any serious spelling problems. You have to explain to them what a spelling bee is.
It is much harder for a Spanish speaking person to learn English than vice-versa, because English has more sounds, and many more consonant groupings.
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well
to be fair
she doesn`t speak spanish very well
it was pointed out when she was engaged to ben affleck ,the he speaks spanish much better than her.
spanish is not her primary language.
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If you listen to JLo, you will see that she actually pronounces the words fairly well, but she has this dumb-blonde, I can't do it expression on her face. Many Americans have this "I know I can't do it, my mouth doesn't work that way" attitude, and will not TRY to pronounce the words. JLo tries, and almost gets it, then apologizes for not getting it right.
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http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~nippon/file/jog240e.html (http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~nippon/file/jog240e.html)
... examining this difference further, let's take a quick look at the experimentation that proved these results. The actual nerves that run from the human ear to the brain cross over, so that sound data from the right ear goes into the left brain, and vice versa.
When different melodies are played at the same time into the right and left ears, which melody does the person hear? The person always recognizes the melody that he heard in his left ear better. This is how we know that the right brain, namely the left ear, is better at music. Similarly, if different words are spoken simultaneously into the right and left ears, the right ear, namely the left brain, has better recognition. That is way we almost always put the telephone receiver to our right ear. There are other more complicated ways to test this, but this is the most fundamental experimentation method.
Using this method and many different types of sounds to find the difference between the left and right brains, it was shown that Japanese and Westerners alike heard music, machinery and noise sounds in the right brain and language sounds in the left brain, but Japanese heard vowels sounds, crying, laughing and sighing, the cries of insects and animals, waves, wind, rain, running water and Japanese musical instruments in the left brain, the same as language, while Westerners heard these sounds in the right brain together with music and noise.
Insect Sounds in America?
Speaking of insect sounds, I had the following experience. While driving through the mountains about two hours' inland from Boston far from human habitation, I came upon a beautiful spot, so I stopped the car to take a rest. I heard insects calling loudly even though it was broad daylight.
While I was listening to their sounds, I suddenly remembered that I never heard the sound of an insect while I lived in California for four years. Even in desert-dry California there is plenty of greenery along the coasts. But in my mind's eye, for some reason the woods that I can picture there were always completely silent. I couldn't ever remember hearing a noisy burst of crickets, or the insects that sing in the long nights of autumn.
What first comes to mind for Americans when they think of insects are mosquitoes, flies and bees, namely pest insects. There are still bees in America, but you hardly ever see flies or mosquitoes. That's why when you occasionally see a fly, you feel that you must be in a very unsanitary place. Where did these "enemies of civilized life" all disappear to?
Also, words that are used to define insects also tend to have bad connotations. The word "insect" when used about a person means "worm, good-for-nothing," while the word "bug" means '"annoy," and is also used to mean a software error, as in "programming bug."
If all insects are pests, and all their songs are just heard as noise, then it wouldn't be strange to think that Americans have used the same poisons they used to eradicate the fly and mosquito to indiscriminately destroy all the other species.
The Culture to Be Heard in Insect Sounds
In contrast, in Japan there is a whole culture to be heard in the sounds of insects. Even today there are websites devoted to images of crickets and recordings of their songs, and there are countless books about how best to keep them. The nursery rhyme "Insect Voices" is an example of how the art we hear in insect sounds is familiar to us from childhood.
Oh, the matsumushi cricket is singing
Chin-chiro, chin-chiro, chin-chiro-rin
Now the suzumushi bell-ring cricket is starting to sing
Rin rin rin rin ri-in rin
Calling out through the long autumn nights
Oh how beautiful are the insects' voices !
All the different kinds of insects like matsumushi and suzumushi sing with different kinds of chirps.
We can imagine the Japanese view of nature that says both humans and insects as part of all living creatures have "voices" and "feelings." The unique characteristic of Japanese people that hears insect sound and human voices in the same language sphere of the brain is very well reflected in our culture.
Dogs Say "Wan-wan," Cats Say "Nya-nya"
Prof. Tsunoda's discovery also showed that besides insect sounds, Japanese also heard other animals' cries, plus the sound of waves, wind, rain and bubbling brooks in the language sphere. In Japanese, brooks say "sara-sara," waves say "zabu-n," rain says "shito-shito," and wind says "byu-byu-." Prof. Tsunoda's discovery is in line with the ancient Japanese view of nature that sees gods living in every natural being, from mountains to rivers and seas, with man being no more or less than one of these natural beings.
The fact that this type of onomatopoeia is so highly developed is a special characteristic of the Japanese language. Maybe it is only natural for children who have been taught these onomatopoeia words from the beginning to learn to process all nature's sounds including insects and animals as language. Or, did these onomatopoeia developed so richly precisely because we started out processing natural sounds in the language sphere?
Either way, the physiological characteristic of Japanese to hear natural sounds in the language sphere of the brain, and the linguistic characteristics of the Japanese language which has highly developed onomatopoeia, together with the Japanese view of nature which finds gods residing in all natural beings, are all very well represented within the Japanese psyche.
Not the Man but the Language
The significant part of Prof. Tsunoda's discovery is that the Japanese pattern of hearing nature sounds in the language sphere is not a matter of ancestry, but rather dependent on whether Japanese was the first language learned.
Data collected from 10 South Americans of Japanese ancestry shows ....