Noncompositional

Yesterday David Beaver posted about a discussion he’d had with Elane Chun (of UT Austin) regarding probable causes of the outrage stemming from a well-known talk show host miming Chinese using ching chong and similar forms. I think the conclusions are probably near the mark, adding a slight variation on Answer C: possibly a sometimes-assumed compliance among Asian Americans that they will (and perhaps should) be treated as a non-mainstream group, for a variety of reasons (recentness of immigration, recentness of “on-screen” activity in the media, being a “model minority”, and perhaps others). I, at least, am somewhat pleased when I see an Asian American role in a TV show or movie wherein their Asianness is not made special mention of, or even silently included (for instance, in some aspect of costume or set design). This is not to say that such things should not be included, but simply that the inclusion of an Asian in a production should not necessarily entail a lot of extra cultural baggage.

In some ways, I wonder if there is a very slightly analogous issue with sign languages. After decades of persuading everyone that sign languages are true languages, on a par with spoken languages like Russian and Hindi, now there is the need to take a broader look at the differences between signed and spoken languages. Of course this must now be done with some caution, without disturbing the status built up for sign languages. Yes, each ethnicity and nationality, even after moving to a melting pot like the US, retains some (or much) of its cultural items, but nonetheless is still on a par with every other group in the nation. But you could still give up some of that cultural stuff and still have some sense of identity with your ancestor’s culture. But, you might not want to. But, …. and so on, and so on.

[Perhaps you're wondering about the title of this post. Well, I was reminded of an activity that I did in fourth grade, where we students were paired up and then asked to prepare a news broadcast in another language. But most of us were monolingual, and so we were encouraged to mimic the accent and words of our target language. Other members of the class would then have to guess the language. Looking back, this strikes me as a very very strange exercise, and I'm not entirely sure what the goal might have been. But I did learn something significant: to have any effect on the audience, there has to be some common ground. Being the strange sort of lad that I was, I decided to do a Tibetan broadcast. I'll leave it to your imagination what exactly the reaction was. But I have to wonder, what sort of feedback would ching chongs have gotten?]