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PPL #3 - The Importance of Being Patrick (Part 2)
Hi, welcome, I’m Patrick from the United States. This is number three of the Poor Polylinguist.
Um. So, last week we talked about English and
Japanese names. This week I want to talk about Spanish and Korean names.
Maybe you remember that I was in Buenos Aires, Argentina for about 3 months from last October.
Argentina is a very long and thin country it’s in South America, it’s right under
Brazil and next to Chile. Like many countries in South America, Argentineans speak Spanish.
So, Spanish and the other romance languages like French and Italian are all derived from
Latin, the ancient language used in Rome, thousands of years ago. Contrary to popular
belief, English is not a Romance language, it’s actually a West Germanic language,
which puts it in the same class as German, Flemish and Yiddish. Despite this , Spanish
and English are a lot more similar than English and German. In fact, Spanish is probably the
most similar commonly used language to English, and many words are similar if not exactly
the same. Likewise, many names are similar, if not the same. I remember, though, on my
first day in Argentina, I met some Argentineans and I asked them what their names were, and
the first one told me: “Paula”. And I was like...what the hell? I’ve never heard
that name in my life. So I had her repeat it: Paula. I couldn’t get it. So, then I
had her write it down: “P-A-U-L-A”. Oh! It’s it’s it’s Paula. Jesus, that’s
easy. So, this type of situation would happen all the time in my first days. Paula. Paula.
Very similar names. Like I would know the name, but I wouldn’t know the name until
I saw it written down.
The same thing would happen when I said my name: “Patrick”. This was a fairly common
experience, but I remember being in line for a McDonald’s and one of the workers asked
me for my name, so I responded ”Patrick”. She couldn’t understand me. I tried changing
the pronunciation: “Patrick”. “Patrick.” To no avail. Didn’t get it. So, out of frustration,
I just said Patricio. “Ohhh, Patricio?” This was a fairly common experience, when
people assumed I was Argentino, a guy from Argentina, I decided to just say my name was
Patricio it was a lot more simple and people had a lot less trouble understanding Patricio
than Patrick.
For similar reasons, I didn’t use my nickname “Pat” in Argentina, I switched to the
more common Spanish nickname for Pat: Pato. I thought that was kind of funny, because
it’s almost exactly the same as my Japanese name, Patto. I told you Japanese and Spanish
are surprisingly similar sometimes. Anyways, I later remembered though, that Pato actually
means duck in Spanish. In fact, Donald Duck, is named Pato Donald in Spanish. And Daffy
Duck is called Pato Lucas.
I got a chance to work on a farm in Argentina for about a month, and while I was there one
of the ducks had a little baby duck. So, I asked the owner of the farm if I could name
the baby duckling. The name I came up with was Pato Wens...
I think they later sold that duck to be fed...
So, maybe you don’t know this, but in very much the same way that English and Spanish
are similar, Japanese and Korean are similar. You see, both languages originally come from
Chinese. Korean is much easier to read Japanese. Their writing system is called Hangul, and
it’s suuuper interesting. I want to teach you about it, but I don’t have time today,
so maybe later. Hangul looks like this: Hangul. Koreans use Hangul 99% of the time. But when
writing their own names, sometimes they use Hangul, but when signing their name on an
official document they’ll use something called Hanja, which are the original Chinese
characters that their names come from. You might remember that the Japanese call these
characters Kanji. You see, Koreans usually only have three syllable names. The first
syllable is their family name. The second and third syllables are their first name.
Most of the time, all three of these characters have a corresponding Hanja that they come
from. That means they have a corresponding Chinese character that has some kind of meaning.
For instance In Hangul, Patrick would become: 패트릭. I don’t go by Pat in Korean because
it sounds way too similar to the word ‘pet’ and everybody thinks I’m an animal. I do
actually have a Korean name, though, that I sometimes use that isn’t Patrick. It kind
of started as a joke, but stuck after a while. So my first name in Korean is: Man Bok. Man
Bok is a very old fashioned country side name. My understanding of Man Bok it’s somewhere
between Cleatus and Jebediah. It’s somewhere in the middle...I think. The reason I liked
it though, besides that, is that it has a good meaning. You see, in Korean ‘Man”
can mean ‘many’ or ‘a lot’. And Bok means ‘luck’. So my first name means “A
lot of luck.” If you know me, you probably know that I’m a really lucky guy. I should
probably be dead by now, but somehow I survived.
My family name is Owens, so my family name in Korean just becomes: Oh. Owens. Oh.
So my full name is Oh Man Bok. Oh man bok actually has a slightly different meaning.
You see, Oh can mean ‘five’ in Korean. And ‘man’ can also mean 10,000. So not
only does Oh Man Bok mean a lot of luck, it means specifically 50,000 Luck. So...if you
ever need any luck, just ask, I’ve got plenty to share.
Anyways, I’m really sick of talking about names. I’m done for today.
Question for today: What do you think about foreigners taking
English names when they go to an English speaking country? Do you think it’s a good idea,
do you think it’s a bad idea and why?
See you next week! Peace.