Question schedule and first answer

[tabouli]

OK, so I've had two more questions from readers, which means I need to recalibrate my questions schedule. Let me see.

Today: slemslempike Is there anything you've learnt about others' views of Australian culture(s) from your work that you didn't know before?
Tues 10th December: sun__king Where would you take a 'Melbourne newbie' to show off your city (say, something

Comments

[ladyknight1512]

Well this was all very interesting! I do like the Australian Down to Earth stuff, because that seems true in my experience.

But I stuck on "This ended up being one of the cornerstones of my Asian names workshop, because it does seem to underlie a fairly strong contrast between these cultures in terms of how they use names."

Could you elaborate on that a little? How do the Australian and Chinese use names? Am intrigued.

[tabouli]

Well. Australian society embraces individualism, and associated values like initiative, independence, originality, personal choice and so forth. The individual is the key social unit in our society, and on some level we see a person's name as part of their identity and therefore treat it with great importance: by and large we demand that people call us what we want to be called across contexts, want people to remember and spell and pronounce our name correctly because this means they are showing us respect and personal regard. We tend to use given names with everyone, regardless of relative status, with the proviso that people between whom there is a large status gap, the lower status person generally uses formal address until invited to use the person's first name (but this invitation is expected, and we're inclined to disapprove of anyone tall poppyish enough to expect formal address to continue

[ladyknight1512]

Hmmm. Interesting. I'm fascinated by names and how people use them. Always have been I think. Stems from that old "having someone's real name gives you power over them" idea I read when I was much younger and more impressionable. And there was the day I started kindergarten. Each kid had little slips of paper with their name written in dotted lines. We had to stick them on all our artwork, but not before we'd traced the lines, so we could learn to write our names. When I arrived the first day, they'd spelled my name wrong; 2 e's, instead of "ie". I cried and they had to reprint my whole batch.

And of course, it continues with character naming. I can't ever start writing until I know exactly what the names of the important characters are. How will I know *who* they are otherwise?

Anyway, thanks for elaborating.

[biascut]

I had a really odd conversation on linguaphiles once with an American who seemed to be further along the spectrum of "name as individual marker of respect" than I was, and in particular with reference to the way a name is pronounced. She (I think) couldn't get over the idea that I thought it was normal to find a pronunciation of someone's name that worked in your accent and matched up with their idea of the sounds and emphasis, even if it wasn't perfect. She was absolutely certain that anything less than a pronunciation that was near identical to how the person pronounced their own name was insulting

[slemslempike]

This was fascinating, thank you! Really interesting points about having so much invested in being down to earth - is it also about authenticity?