a rose by any other name
Okay. Today I'm going to post something snarky and petty, just to get it off my chest. I'm going to start a new tag for it, "stranger in a familiar land." It's about living as an Asian, specifically Chinese-American, in America.
I cannot count the number of times I have had this exact conversation. I roughly estimate that it happens at least once a ( Read more... )
I cannot count the number of times I have had this exact conversation. I roughly estimate that it happens at least once a ( Read more... )
I can't speak for your students, but I know that I don't mind that people can't pronounce my family name "right." Due to idiosyncrasies in transliteration, my family name is not spelled the way it sounds. I know that, and I don't care -- this is just one more adjustment I have to make in immigrating to another country.
What I have gotten REALLY mad at is this: a few times people have INSTRUCTED me that my name should be pronounced differently. I tell them that I know, but that it's too much trouble to correct the 99% of people who pronounce it the way it's spelled. Moreover, I'm not sure that it would serve any purpose. THEN these people chide me for having no proper pride in my culture. It doesn't help that this kind of criticism usually comes from white Americans.
That's why I don't understand why you find it strange that your student took an American first name -- so did I. Our identities are already irrevocably and completely changed; holding onto a new name that much less than 1% of the people in our new country can pronounce properly seems strange. I mean, if I had to move to a new country now, and choose either a name that is familiar to the people there, or have to suffer being called Icky Diarrhea (just an example, but since you know my real name, you can see how it's not entirely out of the question) for the rest of my life, I'd prefer the former, thankyouverymuch.
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On a similar line, my mother always told me that my Chinese name should be spelled "Tsu Zung-Eh" or "Tsu Zung-Ah", but I didn't like a Z in my personal name and I did like S, so that's how I write it (I don't care about the "Eh" or "Ah", and I don't care about a dash or space between them), and I also like to keep the S in the transliteration of my (German/Jewish) last name, so when I give my full Chinese name I spell it "Su Sung-Eh". I think it's a rising tone in the Eh/Ah if that helps. I remember the Eh/Ah part of my name being very hard to write, but the Sung part being easy. Su/Tsu was chosen just as a transliteration of my "real" family name, unfortunately Nga Boo couldn't think of a good pun or anything there. I recently found a chop I was given when I was younger, in traditional characters, and I thought it would be my name but since it has four parts to the name/phrase on it I'm not so sure.
I didn't realize that Cantonese had 8 tones! I always thought it was just different "consonants" from Mandarin, such that it always sounded more guttural or back-of-the-throat than Mandarin. My understanding is that Mandarin's tones are upwards, downwards, flat, and up/down (or was it down/up) - at least that's how I recall JT describing it to me ages ago. Shanghai always sounded sing-songy to me, or lilting and sibilant, as compared to Mandarin.
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Cantonese has 8 tones, several vowels and consonants that don't exist in Mandarin, and ending consonants for many characters. Of all the dialects, Mandarin always sounds the most "modern" to my ears -- the other dialects sound more like Peking opera to me. I wish I knew the sound of Shanghainese better.
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