No more "Christian name, sir?" in Kent, UK

[Joel S. Berson]

At 3/28/2010 11:00 AM, Randy Alexander wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 10:10 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> > At 3/28/2010 02:18 AM, Dan Goodman wrote:
> >>The two Chinese I'm most likely to talk with (owner-operators of a
> >>convenience store in Minneapolis) give their names as "Joe" and "Ann."
> >
> > Many years ago -- 30 to 40 -- I was at a fast food place near the New
> > England Conservatory of Music around noon on a Saturday.  The place
> > was full of teen-age music students, many Asian.  The names I heard
> > bandied about among the female (Asian) violin students were, like,
> > Tiffany, Alison, etc.
>
>I graduated from there in '89.  There were English names then among
>the Asian students, but there was certainly a fair share of Asian
>names.

I should have emphasized that what was striking to me was not the
English names but the frequent choice of .. what, Beverly Hills
90210? Valley Girls? given names.  If I meet a Chinese woman named
"Lily", I think "Well, probably translated."  But "Tiffany"?

Perusing Wikipedia, I find s.v. "Valley Girls (Gossip Girl)":

"Valley Girls" is the forty-second episode overall and the
twenty-fourth episode of the second season of the The CW Television
Network (CW) television series Gossip Girl. ... The episode was
heavily accentuated with references to recognizable elements of
1980's popular culture.

Perhaps about the same time as my encounter with Tiffany.

Joel

Joel

>I would guess at that time, more of them kept their original
>names.  Thinking about it more, it seems that most Chinese students
>would  have English names, but Korean and Japanese students would keep
>their original names.  Maybe tones were a factor in this -- Korean and
>Japanese names wouldn't sound too botched in an American accent, but
>Chinese wouldn't even be close.
>
>--
>Randy Alexander
>Jilin City, China
>Blogs:
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>
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