Monday, April 13, 2009

Texan lawmaker says Asians should adopt surnames that are 'easier for Americans to deal with' - Telegraph

Wow, I'm surprised. Texas politicians are usually so much better informed. Maybe Mrs. Brown would like us all to be named Brown. That would be easy for her to remember. Just cut out all those difficult to remember names like Smith, Jones, and Obama, and just go straight to Brown.

In reality, Asians have difficulty with Asian names. She probably just forgot that Asia is a continent, not a country called China. Chinese students who come here as international students have their names rendered into Japanese pronunciations based on the Chinese characters for their names. It is my understanding, though I have not had direct experience with this, that the same thing happens to Japanese people who go to China. My name is rendered into a more easily understandable Japanese syllabary called katakana, making my name something like Kaku. In fact they wanted to put that on my childrens' Japanese passports, because all names must be written in Roman letters. I held that their family names are not spelled that way, and they have the right to have their names spelled correctly. They are spelled correctly on their passports.



Names are hard work for anybody, and a politician who expects to garner votes from citizens with a population as diverse as America's had better get with it. Immigrants to the US don't have to go through Ellis Island anymore, thankfully, where there names were erroneously transcribed by lazy functionaries. Otherwise there would probably be alot more Browns.

Texan lawmaker says Asians should adopt surnames that are 'easier for Americans to deal with' - Telegraph

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