Re: Whiteness?
| From: | Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, September 5, 2000, 13:23 |
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On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, Jonathan Chang wrote:
> In a message dated 2000:09:04 10:30:28 PM, ray.brown@FREEUK.COM writes:
>
> >Good grief, I can barely trace my own ancestry back to the last (i.e. 19th)
> >century - goodness knows where some of my forebears were 400 years ago!
>
> Jeepers! & I have family scrolls that trace the Changs back about 2,000.
> (Yes, "Chang" is a common Chinese name, but my particular family is
> characterized by our rare logographic character that makes our name distinct
> from many others with similar Romanized/"butchered" names.)
<whistle> My family loses it after 3 or 4 generations back, mainly
because the records got destroyed or lost or who-knows-what during the
Korean War.
It doesn't help that my dad's a "Lee" (pronounced "ee"), a very common
name and also an easily butchered one (Li, Rhee, Yi, Yee, etc. ad
nauseam). My mom's a Cheon, which is rare in South Korea because her
folks came from North Korea/Manchuria and fled south after the end of WWII.
ObConLang: Do y'all deal with butchered foreigners' names in your
conlangs? :-) By some strange coincidence, my name is entirely
pronounceable in Chevraqis. My boyfriend's name is a nightmare (but
then, his last name is Betzwieser, which is a nightmare in Korean, too).
YHL