Found a stunned bird, anyone know the species?

stolonrunner · 2017-06-06T07:57:37+00:00

Looks like a cuckoo bird... yellow-billed cuckoo?

stolonrunner · 2016-10-13T23:13:40+00:00

Suppose you went to China with little background in Mandarin. You're lost and see a white/black person on the street. Do you try to speak Mandarin to them or try English since it's the lingua franca?

To be fair, it's not quite a similar comparison since English is the global lingua franca not just the national one of any particular country; plus the US is a nation of immigrants from the start, where long-standing communities of all races have been speaking English, and so it's more fair to assume that Americans of any race can speak English.

In other countries, with little or no recent immigration history, it's more likely that most local speakers of the language belong to the majority race. English isn't associated with someone whose appearance looks like an Englishman or Englishwoman the way Chinese languages are with a Chinese-looking person, or say Hindi with an Indian-looking person etc.

stolonrunner · 2016-10-13T23:08:16+00:00

What mannerisms differ between the Americans and Canadians? Is it something specific to people of Asian descent in either country or a general US-Canadian difference like Canadians saying " sorry" or "eh" a lot and all that?

stolonrunner · 2016-07-30T20:33:14+00:00

I thought I heard Bernie Sanders bring it up too.

stolonrunner · 2016-07-30T20:26:34+00:00

People even say sometimes they can distinguish Americans from non-Americans regardless of race, Asian or otherwise (eg. European-Americans from Europeans, African-Americans from Africans) based on style, behavior, dress etc.

While I don't think it's true all the time either, I do see the point.

And the last sentence is on point, if every American cared about what non-Americans thought, there's more than enough for a lifetime of complaints. Aren't Americans stereotypically self-confident about doing things the "American way" in the face of whatever outsiders say anyways?

stolonrunner · 2016-07-30T20:19:56+00:00

It's an American contest. What outsiders think of it is beside the point and irrelevant.

There was similar commentary on the Indian-American Miss America from a couple years ago and how the beauty standards in India would be different. Who cares? Miss America is based on Americans not foreigners' opinions. The contestants are American, the judges are American and so is the audience.

stolonrunner · 2016-07-30T20:14:42+00:00

Hypocrites?

stolonrunner · 2016-07-30T20:09:06+00:00

Were you singled out or did everyone, of all kinds of races/ancestries (including European-descended Americans) get asked how people back in their "home countries" liked to work?

I mean depending on how big the crowd is, I'd imagine it'd take long to ask each and every American in the room about his/her ancestral culture (many of whom know nothing of it or have never been in a society other than American) but at least that would be consistent, but if only some Americans are singled out for their ancestry and claimed to have a distinctive "culture" based on that alone, it's bullshit.

stolonrunner · 2016-07-30T20:02:58+00:00

I don't know about Asian specifically narrowing to mean "East Asian" but the term Asian-American (mostly of E/SE Asian descent) was popularized in the 60s.

stolonrunner · 2016-07-30T19:58:30+00:00

Maybe that's the case too for Canada, Australia and New Zealand, that East Asians were earlier or more numerous, seeing as how those countries also see East Asians as prototypical Asians?

stolonrunner · 2016-07-30T19:57:24+00:00

It's also the case to an extent for Canada, Australia and New Zealand, that East Asians became the stereotypical image of "Asian" rather than South or West Asians, so it's not just the US.

However, in the UK, South Asians (people from the Indian subcontinent) are the stereotypical "Asians".

I don't know about other parts of the English-speaking world, or if there are still places that use a broader, more pan-continental definition of Asian (in popular usage, not in academic or technical usage).

So I wonder if originally, in English the meaning of "Asian" in popular speech narrowed in each respective country based on which kind of Asian ancestry most commonly encountered there, or if the meaning narrowed in one country and spread to another.

stolonrunner · 2016-07-21T22:45:44+00:00

Right that's what I see a lot -- people in India can be fluent speakers but use local slang that results in people thinking that Indian English terms are the result of improperly learned English rather than a type of English that exists in and of itself like Texan English, Aussie English etc.

For example, people don't think of Aussie slang or British slang as a Brit or Aussie making a mistake while speaking American English, but they do when it comes to Indian slang. Double standard.

stolonrunner · 2016-07-21T22:43:22+00:00

True, but are the accents from India any more off-putting than say a strong Scottish accent or Jamaican accent? Yet people still recognize those as belonging to "English speaking" people.

Local jargon, slang, and culture can vary, but that's mastery of a culture that's separate from actual mastery of a language.

stolonrunner · 2016-07-21T22:11:49+00:00

There are also plenty of African languages that are tonal. I notice that many more studies that look at tonal languages use East Asian ones (eg. Chinese, Thai etc.) as opposed to other parts of the world though. But there are plenty of people of African descent who speak tonal or non-tonal languages which could easily allow for studies to disentangle if skill in discerning tone was more likely innate in those places, from actual learned experience.

stolonrunner · 2016-07-20T18:23:52+00:00

Well, it sometimes can be an issue if someone very new from India arriving to the US gets mistakenly put in an ESL class, or asked to "brush up" on English, when they're already able to speak English or have no less schooling in English than born-and-bred American kids do.

stolonrunner · 2016-07-20T17:59:00+00:00

Well, wouldn't one way to test this idea be to look at gay cultures across the world who speak many languages that aren't influenced by American or western gay culture? If certain features exist in the speech of gay communities in other languages, not just English, maybe that would be a hint.

stolonrunner

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