7 ms·
Phuc Dat Bich Is Beyond Tired of Getting Kicked Off Facebook
- tempestn 11y agoNow I'm curious whether the differences in name (and more generally, language) sounds are essentially just based on the fluke of whatever sounds happened to start being adopted in various regions millennia ago, and then slowly evolved... or if there is actually a genetic difference between people of different races that causes some sounds to be slightly more pleasant-sounding and/or more easily pronounced than others, which had some influence on the sounds that were more likely to develop into language (and to be picked for names).
- thristian 11y agoGiven the wild variations in phonetics just in countries colonised by England (compare: Texas, New Zealand, Wales), it hardly seems necessary to stretch as far as "genetic differences" for explanation.
- simplicio 11y agoOr for that matter, the wild variations in just Vietnam. Regional variations in pronunciation of the same words just within Vietnam are pretty stark.
- clay_to_n 11y agoThe article points out that the name is pronounced "Foo Da Bic"
- hugh4 11y agoWhy, when romanising their alphabet, did the Vietnamese do it in a way that didn't line up with any European language?
- Turing_Machine 11y agoIt wasn't the Vietnamese who did it. It was the French.
- _delirium 11y agoYou might be interested in the article, "The origin of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet", https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00918824/document https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00918824/document The short version of it is, The missionaries who adapted the Latin alphabet to Vietnamese were Portuguese, Italian and French. The resulting spelling inherited some peculiarities from the spelling systems of Romance languages. For example, on the phonology of 'ch', Among prepalatals, the unvoiced stop CH is taken from the Portuguese and the Spanish, which themselves borrowed this notation from Old French, where it had been created to transcribe a new sound, not found in Latin.
- peteretep 11y agoThey tried to reflect the actual letters used in the original script, and differentiation between them. Same reason the Thai place Phuket had a silent h after the P - romanisation of ภ to differentiate from พ, ผ, ป, and บ, albeit the last two are pb.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoNo romanisation system quite lines up with a specific European language. After all, no European language has the same phonology as the language you're romanising. You also might make apparently strange choices so that the romanisation reflects certain relationships between phonemes or within the language's native writing system. For example, the nihon-siki and kunrei-siki romanisations of Japanese render し and じ as 'si' and 'zi', even though they'd be pronounced more like 'shi' and 'ji', because し is usually grouped with さ ('sa'), す ('su'), せ ('se') and そ ('so'), and じ is grouped with ざ ('za'), ず ('zu'), ぜ ('ze'), and ぞ ('zo'). The Hepburn romanisation of Japanese, on the other hand, renders them as 'shi' and 'ji' for better pronunciation by English speakers, but this obscures the relationship to the other syllables. It also introduces an ambiguity when transliterating back into Japanese's own script, as there are actually two other symbols in the same family which can be used to write these same sounds, which Hepburn can't romanise differently as it needs to present clear pronunciation. Pinyin provides another example. It has the three groups of initials (leading consonants) z-, c- and s-; zh-, ch- and sh-; and j-, q- and x-. An English speaker would pronounce none of these correctly, and they don't match any European language. But there's an internal consistency here within Pinyin: the first group are alveolar consonants, the second retroflex, the third alveo-palatal, and the first initial in each group is an unaspirated affricate, the second an aspirated affricate, the third a fricative. It's providing useful information which is lost if you try to make it so it's pronounced correctly by English speakers - which is rather fruitless given there's some phonetic distinctions in there which don't exist in English.
- ethana 11y agoThis is not even close to the actual Vietnamese pronunciation. [Phúc] is pronounced close to Fook in American English. Without the heavy k-ending. [Đạt] is close to Dac without the heavy c-undertone ending. [Bích] is kind of close to Bic, but you have to say Bic really fast with very light c ending. pattern: Vietnamese pronunciation is generally neutral throughout a word. There's no need for emphasis unless emotion is included.
- vidarh 11y agoIt sounds to me that "Foo Da Bic" is just someones quick and dirty description to avoid having to go into what "without the heavy k-ending" and "without the heavy c-undertone ending" and "with very light c-ending" means and that they got it reasonably close with that in mind. Reality is that nobody will pronounce it right just from those descriptions anyway - Vietnamese isn't exactly a trivial language to pronounce for people who don't know the sounds already -, so they're just going for illustrating that it isn't what every English speaker first think it'll sounds like.
- ars 11y agoCan you make a recording somewhere?
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoIt might be regional. I recall reading some hypothesis that certain sounds were more popular in regions with more humid climates. I can't remember if there was any backing to the suggestion, though.
- cgtyoder 11y agoOne would think FB would have in its data store a "This account has been flagged in the past and it has been reviewed and approved no need to review again" checkbox by now
- amyjess 11y agoSadly, they don't. I'm transgender, and I've heard of several people in my community who are repeatedly targeted by hate groups who report their profiles for using a fake name, and each time they have to scan their legal name change papers and send them to Facebook.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoAfter you've sent a passport scan, you'd think they'd keep the scan on file (though that might be problematic) or at least keep a "legal ID verified" flag. Facebook really don't care, do they?
- morganvachon 11y ago> Facebook really don't care, do they? Mr. Bich one of over a billion users of their service; no, they really don't care. Even the negative PR from this situation is a blip on the radar, and will be forgotten by everyone except Mr. Bich a month from now. I find their treatment of transgender folks even more egregious, but again, Facebook can afford to not care. Even if they caused 10,000 people a day to stop using the service, it would take over 300 years for everyone to leave.
- vidarh 11y agoFor Mr. Bich, I can sort of understand it. But transgender and e.g. other groups like first nations / Indian groups that have also reported problems having their names recognised could quickly escalate to anti-discrimination lawsuits if they're not careful.
- 11y ago
- jawngee 11y agoI don't think his name is real. I live in Vietnam and when I showed this to my wife, who in turned showed it to her cousins, everyone was fairly incredulous claiming that there is no way this was a real Vietnamese name. Bich is not a last name used here, it's actually a female first name. Dat is also not really used as a middle name either. Bạch is a last name, so the only thing I can think is that there was a mixup in immigration, similar to how european last names changed during migration to the US.
- aceperry 11y agoVietnamese names can be a little strange. In college, I had a professor whose first name was usually given to women. All of my Vietnamese friends thought the prof was a woman when they first heard the name.
- simonebrunozzi 11y agoI know the feeling. My name is Simone and I am from Italy. In most of the world, they think it's a female name (usual guess: French lady) until they see me :)
- stephengillie 11y agoThis sounds much like the famous "Boy named Sue" song.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoPerhaps the last name and first name were confused: Vietnamese names are sometimes written with the given name last, right?
- dalke 11y agoAccording to the registry of people living in Sweden, there is a "Phuong Lam Bich" living in the country. Is that not a Vietnamese name, or do you think it's another mixup? There's also a "Tiffany Luong Thi Bich."
- e12e 11y agoI wonder if the Norwegians having the fairly common first name(s) "Odd Even"/"Odd-Even" have any issues. "Odd" is of course also a great first name on its own, especially if English is your second language: "Hello, my name is Odd". "Odd, how?". "No, it really is just Odd" (etc). (Odd means point/edge/tip, as in "spear tip/point", and is pronounced fairly close to "odd", "Even" is pronounced with long e-s, like "end" -- and is a variation on Øyvind which is probably from Norse Øy - luck and Vindr (warrior)). I'm not sure what would be the best common last name to match it with. I suppose the foreign "Moore" would be good. "Even Moore".
- kristofferR 11y agoAnother problematic Norwegian name is Gun. A friend of my mother named Gun supposedly had to add an extra N to be allowed on Facebook.
- vidarh 11y agoGun is so rare that as a Norwegian I still had to look it up to see if anyone actually used it. Apparently there are about 350 of them vs. about 9000 with "Gunn". We do have lots of unusual variations in use, though, so I'm not surprised. It was only after World War II that these things were accurately recorded, and so I have an uncle that has one spelling of his name on his birth certificate, one in his passport, but uses a third spelling for everything else. How he's managed to keep that going, I don't know, since e.g. bank records in Norway are keyed to the same central government register used to issue passports.
- madengr 11y agoBack in grad school there was a guy named Fuk Yun.
- vidarh 11y agoReminds me of the Vietnamese noodle bar in London named "Phật Phúc" which translates to Happy Buddha (Vietnamese puts adjectives after the noun so it's the "Phật" that translates to Buddha). I presume they thought about the likely English mispronunciation when they picked it... (There's apparently also a Phật Phúc in Ho Chi Mihn City - a Chinese takeaway)
- aceperry 11y agoHe should rename his profile to, "the Notorious PDB."
- percept 11y agoFaked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10626761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10626761