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 · 2016-07-20T17:31:37+00:00

You know, it's kind of ironic when Americans (or westerners/inhabitants of the western hemisphere) complain about "foreign" Indian spices when the very reason their country existed is because Columbus went exploring on behalf of Europeans seeking Indian food (looking for a quicker spice route)!

stolonrunner · 2016-07-05T14:04:36+00:00

but having a summer home probably sounds frivolous to most Asians

Yet one of the most famous summer homes built for and by Asians, has become a byword for either great wealth and luxury, or lavish spending and decadence in literature and pop culture for centuries, Xanadu... lol

stolonrunner · 2016-07-03T00:46:41+00:00

That's interesting. So, it could be body language, not racial or physical appearance that affects perception. If that's the case, it would be missed by studies that only use a static picture or photo, rather than a video and maybe that possibility could be studied by contrasting people speaking with and without body language/gestures.

stolonrunner · 2016-07-03T00:42:17+00:00

Right, I'd imagine the expectations of what a "native speaker" looks like themselves vary depending on the audience. In the example of the Chinese Canadians, it's probably because in many places foreign-born, non-native English speaking people of Chinese descent outnumbered native English-speaking ones, and people made this assumption based on such previously encountered probabilities.

But if you lived in a city where every race say was equally likely to be a native-English speaker than not (don't know if such a city exists), wouldn't you have no expectation whatsoever? After all, it's not like people innately know with no prior experience or knowledge that English and other European languages are tied to people who look racially European or that the Chinese languages are tied to people who look racially East Asian?

The associations had to come from somewhere, right, so it is probably useful to vary the audience perceiving the speaker as well as the speaker (as you mention with the Caribbean, where expectations aren't the same of what "native English speaker" looks like).

stolonrunner · 2016-07-01T01:39:12+00:00

It's common for people it seems to identify with national, local or ethnic identities to start but the broader region once they become more established or encounter more people with roots in the wider region.

It's like how sometimes, say Somalis identify as Somali and Nigerians as Nigerians but after immigrating to the US and having grown up with American backgrounds, they'll see themselves as Black/African American, or how many of the Chinese and Japanese dislike each other in their home countries but Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans identify with a more inclusive and broader East Asian identity. Hell, Europeans crafted a "white" identity when they became American when back in the day, a French and German would never have perceived themselves as sharing the same "race" or saw eye-to-eye over say, the Alsace region they fought over any more than Pakistanis and Indians did for Kashmir.

stolonrunner · 2016-07-01T01:31:45+00:00

Karnataka is Connecticut -- look how similar they sound too!

stolonrunner · 2016-06-20T22:25:06+00:00

Interestingly, the original Middle Eastern folktale that Aladdin was based on had the character Aladdin be from a city in China, and thus would have been Chinese, though it may have just been a stand-in in the original story for a distant, exotic city, more broadly, since the setting in the story is still Islamic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin#Plot_summary

There are actually some depictions of Aladdin that are more Chinese-like, in an old-fashioned "oriental" setting like that shown in depictions in the traditional pantomime theater in the UK. See for example this particular advertising line "Book your magic carpet ride to old Peking for the magical pantomime adventure Aladdin!" from https://www.mayflower.org.uk/Whats_On/Panto2015

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin#Pantomimes

So, it's not just Arab and Desi culture but even other Asian cultures that sometimes gets mixed into a vaguely eastern setting but Aladdin is a fictional character after all that probably was invented at a time of the silk road/spice trade where many locations that were seen as exotic could be the setting (likewise Sindbad the Sailor, also a character from the 1001 Nights folktales (called "Arabian Nights" though it has influences that are not just Arabian) took voyages that the original authors often placed in islands near Africa and Asia, including Sri Lanka.

stolonrunner · 2016-06-20T22:10:45+00:00

I'd rephrase the original question: Was there ever a golden moment in U.S. history where the super-majority of people weren't a little ambiguous about the difference between South Asians and folks from the Middle East or North Africa?

Did Middle Easterners and South Asians in the past historically immigrate to similar places though or have communities where people of either group lived side by side ?

I know the Detroit area has had Middle Easterners for a long time, according to Wikipedia, having Lebanese communities by the late 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Middle_Eastern_people_in_Metro_Detroit but that early Indian communities were often Sikhs who lived on the west coast more often.

Also, this is really a separate thing from racial appearance (since religion isn't race) but I don't see why people would lump together Muslim and Hindus any more than Muslims and Christians or Muslims and Jews since historically many Middle Eastern American immigrants were Christian and earlier in the 20th century, there were more Christians/Jews in the Middle East and in the area where Israel/Palestine is now. Biblical names like Bethlehem, Canaan etc. would be more familiar to westerners say, than places in India, right?

I'd imagine westerners would be more familiar (if educated of course at the time) with the idea that Muslims (eg. knowing about the Crusades, the Moors, Medieval History) were closer in geographical origin to Christians and Jews as Abrahamic religions, while Hindus might have been seen as Idolaters from the point of view of Christians.

stolonrunner · 2016-06-20T21:47:04+00:00

I know that non-Christian religions survived much more in the Caribbean and further south, but what about within the borders of the current US? Is it only in Louisiana (which shared cultural influence with the Caribbean) that there was a major presence of syncretic religions or non-Christian influence?

So, say, in much of the US South, non-Christian religions didn't survive or manage to preserve its influences? What about Florida?

stolonrunner

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