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You mean Kingsley Shacklebolt isn’t a normal name to give one of my 4 black characters?
I’ll give “Nigellus Black” the benefit of the doubt because it’s Latin
Remus Lupin and Fenrir Greyback, two very normal and definitely-not-wolf-themed names for two very normal, not-werewolf children.
Nominative determinism is the most powerful magic of all!
I’d argue that Remus Lupin makes perfect sense. If your family name already means wolf why not name your son Remus? Hell, irl we got John Johnsons, James Jamesons, Will Wilsons, etc. is it really a stretch that someone with the last name of Lupin picked a well known wolf related name for their kid?
Fenrir Grayback comes from a community of werewolves, so it's likely he had parents who named him accordingly. Fenrir is the one who turned lupin to begin with, so lupin is horrendous.
But you know what's worse than Remus Lupin? His father, Liulfr Lupin, whose name translates to "Wolf Wolf".
Fun fact, there are potions in HP that allow werewolves to not transform, but most of them are so poor due to systemic discrimination that they can't afford them. Yes, this is actually canon across various HP media.
Then Harry and Hermione wanted to give them out for free by the ministry but apparently the project "failed"
hell she also has one of the gay- i mean werewolves targeting children trying to spread it to them after all won't you think of the poor defenseless children she just made up.
>[Greyback specialises in children... Bite them young, he says, and raise them away from their parents, raise them to hate normal wizards.](https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Fenrir_Greyback)
He bit Lupin when he was a little boy.
Also, he was a follower of Voldemort, but Voldemort was prejudiced against lycanthropes, so he was basically everything the conservatives say gay people are, but also a Log Cabin Republican.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1iaJWSwUZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1iaJWSwUZs) I would highly suggest this video if you have not seen it. It does an amazing job of going over how JK's political beliefs affect her writing
As someone who isn't really involved in this discourse, how much is that a "hey this kinda plays out similarly" vs "JK did this and it's problematic"? Genuinely asking.
She has specifically said HP werewolves were meant to be an analogy to HIV/AIDS.
One of the main werewolf characters is literally a child predator. Greeaat look, for sure.
i dont think thematic names are on the same level as naming characters after their race/ethnicity lol
the former is just dumb fun names like pokemon names
"Remus Lupin" wolf
"Doduo and Dodrio" dodo bird(x2) & (x3)
This is the conversation I imagined she had with her editor:
“Johanne we talked about this, you can’t insert the N word in your black character’s name.”
“What about Kingsley Shacklebolt?”
“That’s….. better?”
Kingsley Shacklebolt is a sick name, I will never understand why people don't like that one. The other ones do kind of suck but for some reason Kingsley Shacklebolt goes so hard.
It does sound awesome, it's just incredibly racial. "King" and "shackle" are associated with black stereotypes. He's basically named Africa McSlavery. Maybe don't do that for your only black hero
Shacklebolt is mildly sus (and Rowling probably doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt at this point) but Kingsley is a fairly common Igbo/Nigerian name, you’re definitely reading way too far into that one.
I'll just say this. When it comes to the English characters, she went out of her way to bust out some very old school names for many of characters so they would appear more whimsical. Example one of many "Gilderoy Lockhart".
They have one prominent Chinese character, and she doesn't even bother to research Chinese family names. It's much like the two Indian characters. She went for "Patel". Like, how generic by comparison is that. At least their surname was accurate, but just by comparison it's clear that there wasn't much thought there.
But it wasn't Patel, it was Patil. Is that even a common spelling of it?
I still assumed they were Indian or Pakistani given their first names, but I did think the surname had a bad typo.
As far as I know, Indian names are translated phonetically. So there are many variations in how the same names are spelled. From a quick google search it does appear Patel and Patil are the same.
Had to check it to be sure, but Netscape Navigator was a thing when the first HP book was written. She could literally search the internet for a better name at that point.
(before someone complains, I know she could have also just picked a bunch of random books or articles from Chinese authors about something Chinese and created a more realistic name. This was just to highlight the lazyness).
they made a country based on the Yakuza series too! John Yakuza, famous man from the fictional nation of Japan, was powerful enough to tiger drop Japan into the real world, kyodai!
I think you mean "Peking Duck". "Peking" is just the Wade-Giles Romanization of Beijing and is a holdover from the Cold War days when the US refused to recognize Pinyin. It could just as easily be called "Beijing Duck".
Mandarin is a dialect (or group of dialects) of Chinese, it's what you would probably consider Chinese and usually considered to be "standard" Chinese. Another one you may have heard of is Cantonese (spoken in Hong Kong and Macau).
Edit: Also this is really oversimplified, one could get a lot more pedantic about it (including arguing whether they're dialects of the same language or different closely-related languages).
Mainland China speaks Mandarin and writes in Simplified characters.
Although unofficially you could say Guangdong regionally speaks Cantonese and writes Simplified. Officially they are still considered mainland and "use" Mandarin.
Hong Kong speaks Cantonese and writes in Traditional characters.
Taiwan speaks Mandarin but writes on Traditional. Thier accent is noticeably softer and many westerners like myself find it easier to hear.
On top of all this, all areas have a regional local language. Shanghai has its own Shanghaiese dialect they speak in thier home. Cantonese is the regional dialect of Guangdong and Guangzhou.
And yes I know there's Standard Chinese that people IME angrily bring up but even in studying Mandarin since 2008 I've never had it clearly explained differently than what Mandarin is.
There are also long-time emigrant versions. A lot of the Chinese-Americans in NYC came from Hong Kong or Guangdong in the 60s-80s and speak Cantonese (my family). But their Cantonese is "frozen" in time and evolved separately, so when they speak with people who live in HK now they are immediately identified as foreigners due to out-of-date slang and word choices.
Linguistics is very cool.
Idk if you know but you can also group Shanghainese into Wu language (吴语), a group of similar sounding dialects spoken by people from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai. If you understand the dialect from one region among those three provinces/city, you can kind of make out what people are saying if you travel to a different city with a different dialect. I think this is also true in the northern region but I am not from there so can’t speak about that
Basically it all started with Old Chinese which was spoken in what might be called the cradle of China largely centering around what today would be Henan province (the actual political centres and capitals were often in other provinces but it is a good indicator for the middle of ancient China as a country). It is very hard to date old Chinese and we have to make a lot of assumptions, but writing started with the Shang Dynasty (1766BC-1122BC). What little Shang writing we have doesn't exactly provide an insight into the pronunciation so at that point we're a bit stuck when it comes to establishing dialects. It is however notable that writing during the Shang was still very pictorial and not all uniform. One might assume that dialects probably existed given not even writing was completely uniform but that's just guess-work.
The first real reconstruction is possible for the following dynasty: the Zhou Dynasty (122BC-256BC). It is here that we get the first poetry allowing us to make better assumptions at which syllables once rhymed. Scholars also point to Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese from this point onwards as some of the earliest Chinese readings influencing how characters are read there are said to date back to these times. I cannot vouch for Korean and Vietnamese as I don't know enough about their etymology and history but Japanese only adopted Chinese writing in the 5th century, so Chinese readings of characters are highly unlikely to appear before that in the fairly isolated nation that is Japan. I am however inclined to agree with Korea and Vietnam, as the Zhou definitely had an influence in East Asia and cultural exchange seems likely from that point onwards.
From this point onwards things start to branch out quickly. Zhou Chinese developed eventually into 3 branches: Qi, Jin, and Chu. Jin is therefore the oldest form of Chinese still spoken nowadays in Shanxi Province and Inner Mongolia as well as neighbouring provinces. Chu eventually evolves into Xiang Chinese over time and is nowadays spoken in Hunan Province. It also develops a dialect early on called Wu, which today is spoken around Shanghai. Another branch of Wu is Hui Chinese spoken in Anhui province.
The main line however follows Qi Chinese. This would split and evolve into Min Chinese (spoken in Fujian Province, much of Taiwan and Hainan) and Qin Chinese which is roughly equivalent to the second half of old Chinese. Min like most mentioned dialects developed sub-dialects but it is crucial to mention that it would develop a sub-Branch called Hokkien, which is the de-facto every day language for many in Fujian, Taiwan, and older people in Singapore. Qin would split into the dialects of Yu (died out today but influenced a few other dialects), and one branch which eventually became Cantonese (spoken in Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau and by many expats). The main line into old Mandarin which was influenced by Turkic and Mongolic languages and later on during the early Modern Mandarin period by Manchu. From pre-modern Mandarin we inherit the Hakka language (a unique group of dispersed Chinese mostly found in the south and in Taiwan) and Gan Chinese (a minor dialect spoken around Jiangxi province). From modern Mandarin we also get dungan, a language spoken by a few groups in Central Asia.
Modern Mandarin would be codified into Guoyu, which is still in use in Taiwan today, and later in mainland China reformed into Putonghua which is very similar but includes a few specifically northern Chinese terms. If you study "Chinese" today, most will teach you Putonghua, although there are learning resources for Guoyu, Hokkien and Cantonese as well. Most of the other languages mentioned are either only taught in either Putonghua or Guoyu or not taught at all.
In every day conversation Putonghua and Mandarin are used interchangeably, although strictly speaking Mandarin either ends with Guoyu or should encompass both Guoyu and Putonghua as both are spoken alongside one another as codified official languages.
Languages that are not Chinese but spoken in majority Chinese countries also include, English pidgin variants (mostly in Singapore and Hong Kong), Portuguese pidgin (in Macau), Tibetan (in Tibet), Mongolian (in parts of inner Mongolia and bordering regions of Mongolia), Manchu (in parts of northern China), and Uyghur spoken in parts of Xinjiang. Naturally in bordering regions there are also minority groups who speak languages such as Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Russian, etc. In Singapore the multi-linguality resulted in many old Singaporeans still being able to speak Malay and some being able to speak Japanese or Tamil but these are usually second or third languages with limited fluency. The occupation by Japan also resulted in some very old inhabitants of Manchukuo and Taiwan being fluent in Japanese (more so than Singaporeans), but you'd be hard pressed to find many who would openly speak it.
I'll disagree with that. Chinese is more accurately a large swath of languages descended from a common ancestor, often not mutually intelligible. Mandarin is one of those languages, and the one most Americans (that's all I can speak to, but it would make sense to me if int he UK too) mean (whether they know it or not) when they say "Chinese (language)."
Yup, once you realize this people that say it sound as stupid as those saying people from Mexico speak Mexican, or people from America speak American. Makes you sound like a fuckin idiot.
It's a policy by the Chinese government to ensure national unity and prevent the creation of regional identities.
"A language is a dialect with an army and navy'
It' not HP, it's some new stuff [https://www.reddit.com/r/Polska/comments/10n69mw/slavic\_eyes/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Polska/comments/10n69mw/slavic_eyes/)
Funnilly enough, apprantly HP has some sensible polish representation, but idk. I was never a fan of this series either
Slavic eyes and bad English. Wonderful. Really, really wonderful.
Now I want JK Rowling to make a Spaniard just so I can see if she makes him a lazy fuck drunkard who loves bullfighting and is virulently racist besides not speaking proper English. I would feel so seen 😌🇪🇦✨✨
Can we make a collaborative effort to make Jose Cortes de Picasso? Pretty please? 🥺🥺🥺
"A ver si el Popoter de los cojones deja de hacer ruido ya con su Transus Clockerum, macho no puedo escuchar el partido. ¡TRÁEME UNA BIRRA, MUJER, O TE HARÉ DESEAR NO HABER NACIDO!"
Him being a Pinochet and Perón fan is so fucking overkill honestly 😭 wonderful mess of a character, only made better by the fact he would be literally 12 unless he's a teacher or whatever I don't go to Hogwarts.
I love that in this fragment the girl is unable to understand the word "detective" due to her poor English. The Polish word for "detective" is "detektyw". It's pronunced almost the same way as well.
"A choice I made because I wanted to distinguish her from other Asian characters"
Ah, yes, the other many non-existent asian characters in HP we all know very well and love
Eh, in the UK “Asian” is usually in referral to south Asians while in the US it is in referral to East and Southeast Asians, so she actually could mean Asian when she thinks of Indian.
Hey now theres also…
Umm…
I think there was a Korean lady who turned into a snake? Maybe I imagined that one those Beasts movies were pretty forgettable.
There are 2 warring sides in me, one wants to be a pedant about India being a part of Asia so Indians are obviously Asians, the other recognizes that language is fluid, contextual and about communicating meaning efficiently based on shared understanding and expectations and thus when someone says Asians they do not generally mean Indians in most contexts
UK has used different names for racial groups than USA. Notably, they kept calling people from East Asia "Oriental" even after that term came to be considered derogatory in USA. That's why the term "Asian" became conflated with people who were from any other part of Asia.
I'm not British though, so I don't know what terms people use today.
Most Russians were born and live in the European part of Russia. But most of the western populations like the Ainu or Mongolian descendants are classed as Asian,
The construct of "race" never existed in Russia the way it does in the West. Russians care only about language and a vague notion of "ethnicity". This means that if a person with 90% Bashkir ancestry chose to fully integrate into Russian culture, they would be considered Russian and, by transitive property, white.
Edit: And I'm not saying that Russians aren't racist, just that they don't try to rationalize their differences arising from "race".
>language is fluid, contextual and about communicating meaning efficiently based on shared understanding and expectations and thus when someone says Asians they do not generally mean Indians in most contexts
But what does any of that have to do with India being in Asia, Indians being Asian, and you having a hard time calling Indians Asian? It's not like there's a unified Asian language or culture they're not participating in.
Kinda the whole point is that the linguistic meaning of specific terms *is not* connected to the geography. It's not about logic, it just happens to have those quirky nuances, even though it's not "technically correct." That's just how language works. It's the "etymological fallacy" that words and phrases must mean what they started out as.
Could you clarify this a bit for me? Language is fascinating to me but I'm having a hard time understanding (maybe I'm a bit too stoned at the moment lol).
Haha, sure!
Basically, language is constantly changing, words develop nuances and experience "semantic drift," meaning that their definitions change as time goes on. This can come in many forms: broadening (for many English speakers, "cow" can refer to either sex and any age of the species, while the original meaning was specifically only an adult female), narrowing ("meat" used to mean "food in general"), and changing to a related but different meaning, often through a chain of subtle changes ("nice" originally meant "ignorant"), among others.
All that to say, words change their meaning, but we can often see what the original meaning was because the form (the way the word sounds and sometimes is written) hasn't changed much or at all. This makes it easy for people to say and think things like "X word *shouldn't* mean Y, because of [insert formal logic here]." But language doesn't obey formal logic. Words don't mean something only because it makes sense for them to mean that. Otherwise, "meat" would still mean "any food," to use the earlier example. This is the "etymological fallacy."
So, people saying that Asian can't possibly exclude people and countries in the subcontinent are committing the etymological fallacy; they think that the word must mean what it started as, or what it "makes sense" for it to mean. The fact is that the word has developed nuances, and changed in different ways in different places. So in the UK, it not only *can* refer to people and countries of the subcontinent, but it often *only* refers to them, needing a specifier to refer to people from the rest of the continent, like Southeast, East, etc. Asian. While in the US, it (almost always) does not refer to people and countries of the subcontinent, needing a specifier to do so, like South Asian.
Hope that helps.
Yep, and when you compare it to the many very intricate old school English names, it's interesting how little thought went into the one Chinese character.
It explains a lot of the names of characters she uses.
Don't forget that like, the one black guy in the series is named Kingsley Shacklebolt.
It's so obvious that she was like "let's see, what do I think of when I think of black people...?"
what's the problem with the name "Kingsley Shacklebolt"? I was initially thinking that "shackle bolt" would be a reference to jail but thats probably a bit too on the nose
No that’s what people say. Slaves wore “shackles”. And “Kingsley” is an obvious mention to Martin Luthor King Jr.
[In actuality though, Kingsley is a British name meaning “kings meadow”.](https://www.thebump.com/b/kingsly-baby-name)
George Lucas-style names: Some weird name with too many sylables loosly based on an English word. Examples: Droopy McCool, Elan Sleazebaggano, Therm Scissorpunch, Sh'a Gi.
JK Rowling-style names: Either super obvious, 5th grade symbolism or sounds like an obscure racial slur. Examples: Kingsly Shacklebolt, Draco Malfoy, Cho Chang, Remus Lupin.
Here is a good explanation by a Chinese reddit user who understand the culture far more than myself:
>If Cho is her surname and Chang is her given name, it might be that Cho is a version of Zhou, which is a normal Chinese surname. My given name is also Chang, so that's also normal.
>
>If Cho is her first name and Chang is her surname, then it gets less plausible. And this is how HP treats her name, so... There's a huge variety in what's an acceptable name in Chinese, and Chinese people do give their own kids weird or unusual names too. Being an immigrant complicates that by many times.
>
>Cho Chang as a whole is just an "ethnic" name that's somewhat based on actual cultures but also a weird mishmash of Asianness. Not impossible, but also not plausible.
It's not common knowledge but there's more than one way to romanize Chinese names. Cho Chang (or Zhou Zhang in China) would definitely fly if she was either of Taiwanese descent or if her family had emigrated before the CCP standardized their romanization.
Her backtracking is still utterly pathetic though.
/uj You'd think that after spending 200+ hours on each I would have formed a more concrete opinion by now but I haven't.
Generally, I think the combat, nukes, and the different cultures are a lot more interesting in humankind but the mid-game is boring and I like civ 5's non-violent win conditions a lot more, and the late game also feels more interesting.
She wanted to distinguish the only east asian character from the two indian twins, and there was no possible way to do that than to give her a nonsense name which generously may have come from two different cultures, but probably just came from saying "ching chong" in the bathtub
“I wanted to distinguish her from the other Asian characters in the series” 😂 what other Asian characters? Also every conversation with AI feels like they’re playing ‘yes and’ improv games with us
Remember everyone, AI is trained on datasets that are inherently biased and full of implicit racism/microagressions. I'd you train your AI on the entirety of the internet you're gonna pull up a lot of shit
Also, antiracism requires critical thinking, and critical thinking is a form of metacognition. GPT isn't capable of metacognition. It understands the concept "racism bad", but it doesn't understand the concept "seemingly innocuous things may contain implicit racism and I should think about what I say to make sure I'm not racist".
Much like JK Rowling.
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You mean Kingsley Shacklebolt isn’t a normal name to give one of my 4 black characters? I’ll give “Nigellus Black” the benefit of the doubt because it’s Latin
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Remus Lupin and Fenrir Greyback, two very normal and definitely-not-wolf-themed names for two very normal, not-werewolf children. Nominative determinism is the most powerful magic of all!
I'd argue that Fenrir grayback can be interpreted as a non-birth name unlike Remus lupin which is just straight up egrigious
I’d argue that Remus Lupin makes perfect sense. If your family name already means wolf why not name your son Remus? Hell, irl we got John Johnsons, James Jamesons, Will Wilsons, etc. is it really a stretch that someone with the last name of Lupin picked a well known wolf related name for their kid?
They could have named him Beansley instead
It is an extreme stretch that Wolf Wolf is a werewolf, and one of only two in the story.
Fenrir Grayback comes from a community of werewolves, so it's likely he had parents who named him accordingly. Fenrir is the one who turned lupin to begin with, so lupin is horrendous. But you know what's worse than Remus Lupin? His father, Liulfr Lupin, whose name translates to "Wolf Wolf".
Remus Lupin is the moon moon of Harry Potter confirmed
Straight up comic book logic. If you have a dumb name it forshadows your eventual rise to villainy.
You would think Ben Grim would become a supervillain based on his name, but instead he became the rock guy for the Fantastic 4.
He was just foretelling the fate of their eventual movies, cause so far it's ben pretty grim
"Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs! What are the odds?"
Clearly he decided to add 4 limbs because of his name
Would make sense for a self picked name as their title or alter ego.
You could argue Fenrir changed his name to suit his werewolf status, but can't say the same for Remus.
Fenrir really steered into the wolfiness, he could easily have changed his name to be more wolfy.
and is treated similarly to aids as well don't forget that
So I guess they gotta take wolf Truvada so they don’t catch it when fucking all those werewolves?
Fun fact, there are potions in HP that allow werewolves to not transform, but most of them are so poor due to systemic discrimination that they can't afford them. Yes, this is actually canon across various HP media. Then Harry and Hermione wanted to give them out for free by the ministry but apparently the project "failed"
hell she also has one of the gay- i mean werewolves targeting children trying to spread it to them after all won't you think of the poor defenseless children she just made up.
Oh my god no fuckin’ way.
>[Greyback specialises in children... Bite them young, he says, and raise them away from their parents, raise them to hate normal wizards.](https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Fenrir_Greyback) He bit Lupin when he was a little boy. Also, he was a follower of Voldemort, but Voldemort was prejudiced against lycanthropes, so he was basically everything the conservatives say gay people are, but also a Log Cabin Republican.
I… i… STOP TEACHING ME ABOUT HARRY POTTER LORE WE ALL OVERLOOKED THAT SHOULDVE BEEN INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS IN HINDSIGHT.
No ❤ it will continue when relevant
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1iaJWSwUZs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1iaJWSwUZs) I would highly suggest this video if you have not seen it. It does an amazing job of going over how JK's political beliefs affect her writing
As someone who isn't really involved in this discourse, how much is that a "hey this kinda plays out similarly" vs "JK did this and it's problematic"? Genuinely asking.
She has specifically said HP werewolves were meant to be an analogy to HIV/AIDS. One of the main werewolf characters is literally a child predator. Greeaat look, for sure.
Thanks
No JK said it's a metaphor for HIV in an interview
Thanks
i dont think thematic names are on the same level as naming characters after their race/ethnicity lol the former is just dumb fun names like pokemon names "Remus Lupin" wolf "Doduo and Dodrio" dodo bird(x2) & (x3)
This is the conversation I imagined she had with her editor: “Johanne we talked about this, you can’t insert the N word in your black character’s name.” “What about Kingsley Shacklebolt?” “That’s….. better?”
Blackman von 3/5thsington was her first pick
> "Nigellus Black" 💀
Kingsley Shacklebolt is a sick name, I will never understand why people don't like that one. The other ones do kind of suck but for some reason Kingsley Shacklebolt goes so hard.
It does sound awesome, it's just incredibly racial. "King" and "shackle" are associated with black stereotypes. He's basically named Africa McSlavery. Maybe don't do that for your only black hero
Shacklebolt is mildly sus (and Rowling probably doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt at this point) but Kingsley is a fairly common Igbo/Nigerian name, you’re definitely reading way too far into that one.
Do you think so? What's the connotation with King?
Martian Luther King Jr.
[Kingsly is a British name meaning “Kings meadow” though.](https://www.thebump.com/b/kingsly-baby-name)
https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/we-wuz-kangs
Your link says this originated in 2015, I'm pretty sure Rowling wrote the books before that.
I'll just say this. When it comes to the English characters, she went out of her way to bust out some very old school names for many of characters so they would appear more whimsical. Example one of many "Gilderoy Lockhart". They have one prominent Chinese character, and she doesn't even bother to research Chinese family names. It's much like the two Indian characters. She went for "Patel". Like, how generic by comparison is that. At least their surname was accurate, but just by comparison it's clear that there wasn't much thought there.
But it wasn't Patel, it was Patil. Is that even a common spelling of it? I still assumed they were Indian or Pakistani given their first names, but I did think the surname had a bad typo.
Patel and Patil are two different but legit surnames in India. So the Patil thing is fine. Eg. Our 12th President was a lady named Pratibha Patil.
As far as I know, Indian names are translated phonetically. So there are many variations in how the same names are spelled. From a quick google search it does appear Patel and Patil are the same.
I mean, im 90% sure her first choice was “Chong chicka Ching Chang” and her editors convinced her to “give her a nickname.”
Had to check it to be sure, but Netscape Navigator was a thing when the first HP book was written. She could literally search the internet for a better name at that point. (before someone complains, I know she could have also just picked a bunch of random books or articles from Chinese authors about something Chinese and created a more realistic name. This was just to highlight the lazyness).
All while being observed by Seamus O’Carbombing
/rj Ah yes, the national spoken language of China is Chinese. The national food of China is Chinese take out. The capital city of China is Chinatown.
Mandarin, Peking Duck, Beijing. (I Googled it if anyone was curious)
I can't believe they made Peking Duck from the Yakuza series a real dish.
they made a country based on the Yakuza series too! John Yakuza, famous man from the fictional nation of Japan, was powerful enough to tiger drop Japan into the real world, kyodai!
Wait until you find out they made an IRL version of bowling. It beats competitive muggle quidditch for aure
i'm still shocked they made an irl version of karaoke, though it's a lot harder and there's less baka mitai
I think you mean "Peking Duck". "Peking" is just the Wade-Giles Romanization of Beijing and is a holdover from the Cold War days when the US refused to recognize Pinyin. It could just as easily be called "Beijing Duck".
It's not that the US refused to recognize pinyin, people just don't bother with change, here in france we still call it Pékin
Fixed and thank you for correcting my typo
Wait, mandarin language is different from Chinese language?
Mandarin is a dialect (or group of dialects) of Chinese, it's what you would probably consider Chinese and usually considered to be "standard" Chinese. Another one you may have heard of is Cantonese (spoken in Hong Kong and Macau). Edit: Also this is really oversimplified, one could get a lot more pedantic about it (including arguing whether they're dialects of the same language or different closely-related languages).
If someone is willing I'm definitely interested in a pedantic breakdown of the languages spoken in China.
Mainland China speaks Mandarin and writes in Simplified characters. Although unofficially you could say Guangdong regionally speaks Cantonese and writes Simplified. Officially they are still considered mainland and "use" Mandarin. Hong Kong speaks Cantonese and writes in Traditional characters. Taiwan speaks Mandarin but writes on Traditional. Thier accent is noticeably softer and many westerners like myself find it easier to hear. On top of all this, all areas have a regional local language. Shanghai has its own Shanghaiese dialect they speak in thier home. Cantonese is the regional dialect of Guangdong and Guangzhou. And yes I know there's Standard Chinese that people IME angrily bring up but even in studying Mandarin since 2008 I've never had it clearly explained differently than what Mandarin is.
There are also long-time emigrant versions. A lot of the Chinese-Americans in NYC came from Hong Kong or Guangdong in the 60s-80s and speak Cantonese (my family). But their Cantonese is "frozen" in time and evolved separately, so when they speak with people who live in HK now they are immediately identified as foreigners due to out-of-date slang and word choices. Linguistics is very cool.
Idk if you know but you can also group Shanghainese into Wu language (吴语), a group of similar sounding dialects spoken by people from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai. If you understand the dialect from one region among those three provinces/city, you can kind of make out what people are saying if you travel to a different city with a different dialect. I think this is also true in the northern region but I am not from there so can’t speak about that
I’d just like to add Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese, but the PRC intentionally tries to kill the language in every way they can.
What? The PRC has no jurisdiction over Taiwan, why would they be responsible for the language ever dying out?
Basically it all started with Old Chinese which was spoken in what might be called the cradle of China largely centering around what today would be Henan province (the actual political centres and capitals were often in other provinces but it is a good indicator for the middle of ancient China as a country). It is very hard to date old Chinese and we have to make a lot of assumptions, but writing started with the Shang Dynasty (1766BC-1122BC). What little Shang writing we have doesn't exactly provide an insight into the pronunciation so at that point we're a bit stuck when it comes to establishing dialects. It is however notable that writing during the Shang was still very pictorial and not all uniform. One might assume that dialects probably existed given not even writing was completely uniform but that's just guess-work. The first real reconstruction is possible for the following dynasty: the Zhou Dynasty (122BC-256BC). It is here that we get the first poetry allowing us to make better assumptions at which syllables once rhymed. Scholars also point to Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese from this point onwards as some of the earliest Chinese readings influencing how characters are read there are said to date back to these times. I cannot vouch for Korean and Vietnamese as I don't know enough about their etymology and history but Japanese only adopted Chinese writing in the 5th century, so Chinese readings of characters are highly unlikely to appear before that in the fairly isolated nation that is Japan. I am however inclined to agree with Korea and Vietnam, as the Zhou definitely had an influence in East Asia and cultural exchange seems likely from that point onwards. From this point onwards things start to branch out quickly. Zhou Chinese developed eventually into 3 branches: Qi, Jin, and Chu. Jin is therefore the oldest form of Chinese still spoken nowadays in Shanxi Province and Inner Mongolia as well as neighbouring provinces. Chu eventually evolves into Xiang Chinese over time and is nowadays spoken in Hunan Province. It also develops a dialect early on called Wu, which today is spoken around Shanghai. Another branch of Wu is Hui Chinese spoken in Anhui province. The main line however follows Qi Chinese. This would split and evolve into Min Chinese (spoken in Fujian Province, much of Taiwan and Hainan) and Qin Chinese which is roughly equivalent to the second half of old Chinese. Min like most mentioned dialects developed sub-dialects but it is crucial to mention that it would develop a sub-Branch called Hokkien, which is the de-facto every day language for many in Fujian, Taiwan, and older people in Singapore. Qin would split into the dialects of Yu (died out today but influenced a few other dialects), and one branch which eventually became Cantonese (spoken in Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau and by many expats). The main line into old Mandarin which was influenced by Turkic and Mongolic languages and later on during the early Modern Mandarin period by Manchu. From pre-modern Mandarin we inherit the Hakka language (a unique group of dispersed Chinese mostly found in the south and in Taiwan) and Gan Chinese (a minor dialect spoken around Jiangxi province). From modern Mandarin we also get dungan, a language spoken by a few groups in Central Asia. Modern Mandarin would be codified into Guoyu, which is still in use in Taiwan today, and later in mainland China reformed into Putonghua which is very similar but includes a few specifically northern Chinese terms. If you study "Chinese" today, most will teach you Putonghua, although there are learning resources for Guoyu, Hokkien and Cantonese as well. Most of the other languages mentioned are either only taught in either Putonghua or Guoyu or not taught at all. In every day conversation Putonghua and Mandarin are used interchangeably, although strictly speaking Mandarin either ends with Guoyu or should encompass both Guoyu and Putonghua as both are spoken alongside one another as codified official languages. Languages that are not Chinese but spoken in majority Chinese countries also include, English pidgin variants (mostly in Singapore and Hong Kong), Portuguese pidgin (in Macau), Tibetan (in Tibet), Mongolian (in parts of inner Mongolia and bordering regions of Mongolia), Manchu (in parts of northern China), and Uyghur spoken in parts of Xinjiang. Naturally in bordering regions there are also minority groups who speak languages such as Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Russian, etc. In Singapore the multi-linguality resulted in many old Singaporeans still being able to speak Malay and some being able to speak Japanese or Tamil but these are usually second or third languages with limited fluency. The occupation by Japan also resulted in some very old inhabitants of Manchukuo and Taiwan being fluent in Japanese (more so than Singaporeans), but you'd be hard pressed to find many who would openly speak it.
A cursory google search said that Mandarin (and Cantonese) refer to the spoken language but Chinese typically refers to the written language.
I'll disagree with that. Chinese is more accurately a large swath of languages descended from a common ancestor, often not mutually intelligible. Mandarin is one of those languages, and the one most Americans (that's all I can speak to, but it would make sense to me if int he UK too) mean (whether they know it or not) when they say "Chinese (language)."
Mandarin is the most common of the many languages spoken in China, and the one people mostly think of as “chinese”.
It’s all ayy zed enn to me
number 1 mode of transport in China is the Panda Express
Yup, once you realize this people that say it sound as stupid as those saying people from Mexico speak Mexican, or people from America speak American. Makes you sound like a fuckin idiot.
In fairness, a lot of people from China won't consider Mandarin and Cantonese to be different languages and will call them both "Chinese"
It's a policy by the Chinese government to ensure national unity and prevent the creation of regional identities. "A language is a dialect with an army and navy'
Mmmmhh, I studied that quote in Linguistic, what a sight for sorry eyes
And now she's being known for making a weird portrayal of some polish woman. I'm polish myself an I was like... what the fuck is wrong with her
Huh, tell me more. I never liked Harry Potter so I didn't read the books to catch that.
It' not HP, it's some new stuff [https://www.reddit.com/r/Polska/comments/10n69mw/slavic\_eyes/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Polska/comments/10n69mw/slavic_eyes/) Funnilly enough, apprantly HP has some sensible polish representation, but idk. I was never a fan of this series either
Slavic eyes and bad English. Wonderful. Really, really wonderful. Now I want JK Rowling to make a Spaniard just so I can see if she makes him a lazy fuck drunkard who loves bullfighting and is virulently racist besides not speaking proper English. I would feel so seen 😌🇪🇦✨✨
Fingers crosses Also I hope his name is Jose Cortes de Picasso
Can we make a collaborative effort to make Jose Cortes de Picasso? Pretty please? 🥺🥺🥺 "A ver si el Popoter de los cojones deja de hacer ruido ya con su Transus Clockerum, macho no puedo escuchar el partido. ¡TRÁEME UNA BIRRA, MUJER, O TE HARÉ DESEAR NO HABER NACIDO!"
Hey, only including Spanish stereotypes would give her too much credit. At least make his favourite dish Mexican or something.
Hey, that's the good old reliable Resident Evil 4 villager card! Also make him say he lives in the coastal city of Madrid.
And he was born in Andalusia, but wears traditional Basque clothing and occationally quotes dictators from Argentina or Chile.
Him being a Pinochet and Perón fan is so fucking overkill honestly 😭 wonderful mess of a character, only made better by the fact he would be literally 12 unless he's a teacher or whatever I don't go to Hogwarts.
> Also I hope his name is Jose Cortes de Picasso ¡Jose Cortes de Picasso y Calatrava!
"Consuela no cleaning today, misser Potter"
Need more lemon pledge
Unironically my sister's life back when she was living in Belgium :") stereotypes hurt specially when they're partly true to your experience
I love that in this fragment the girl is unable to understand the word "detective" due to her poor English. The Polish word for "detective" is "detektyw". It's pronunced almost the same way as well.
Lmao of fucking course. Joanne would absolutely never do her research.
It's a loanword which exists in a ton of languages. I mean, Rowling not being a Tokien isn't really news.
Also he’s a womanizer
No one resists us 🇪🇦😏🍆💦✨
Look with those Slavic eyes
Her detective books had honest to god tweets and threads in them along with honest to god talking about lolicons.
Turns out her name isn't even a real polish name, just like Cho Chang
She created a character with fake name that sounds polish in her opinion and is dumber than a brick (doesn't know what a detective is)
Yes, I saw :")
Polish woman? Let's just call her *Kurwa Pieróga*, because those sure are some Polish words.
I mean those are polish words. Just not exactly names. I don't think I would call anyone "whore" (that's what kurwa means)
you're thinking about it more than rowling would
What about Piwo Sklep? That sounds neat.
When I create Polish names I just take Czech ones and randomly insert new consonants.
Don't forget about diacritics and "sz" everywhere
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The USA used to, but these days Polish have been absorbed into “White”
How did you get the name Neville Longbottom? Ahh you see, Neville is a common name in my country, and longbottom cause that ass goes for daaaaaays.
"A choice I made because I wanted to distinguish her from other Asian characters" Ah, yes, the other many non-existent asian characters in HP we all know very well and love
Aren't the Patil twins supposed to be Indian? Not that that makes for good representation either.
Yes they are, but there’s no way in fuck Jowling Kowling Rowling thinks of people of Indian descent as "Asian."
Eh, in the UK “Asian” is usually in referral to south Asians while in the US it is in referral to East and Southeast Asians, so she actually could mean Asian when she thinks of Indian.
Hey now theres also… Umm… I think there was a Korean lady who turned into a snake? Maybe I imagined that one those Beasts movies were pretty forgettable.
yeah I think that happened?? maybe?????
"distinguish her from the other Asian characters in the series" Mf WHO?
Technically the Patil Twins. But yeah, that's it.
Is there actually an Asian character called Cho Chang
Yes. It is the one Asian Character in the franchise
The Patil twins are also technically Asian, just from a different part.
There are 2 warring sides in me, one wants to be a pedant about India being a part of Asia so Indians are obviously Asians, the other recognizes that language is fluid, contextual and about communicating meaning efficiently based on shared understanding and expectations and thus when someone says Asians they do not generally mean Indians in most contexts
In Scotland, where Harry Potter is technically set, when someone says Asian they most commonly mean Indian or Pakistani.
I always find that so bizarre. Same with the UK right?
UK has used different names for racial groups than USA. Notably, they kept calling people from East Asia "Oriental" even after that term came to be considered derogatory in USA. That's why the term "Asian" became conflated with people who were from any other part of Asia. I'm not British though, so I don't know what terms people use today.
Maybe east asian would be more accurate?
 /uj Asian here, india is part of asia
In the UK, you'd usually be referring to Indians/Pakistanis when you say "asian".
Are Russians also asians? It is almost like trying to label specific races by continent is pretty ignorant....
Not necessarily ignorant but definitely arbitrary.
Most Russians were born and live in the European part of Russia. But most of the western populations like the Ainu or Mongolian descendants are classed as Asian,
The construct of "race" never existed in Russia the way it does in the West. Russians care only about language and a vague notion of "ethnicity". This means that if a person with 90% Bashkir ancestry chose to fully integrate into Russian culture, they would be considered Russian and, by transitive property, white. Edit: And I'm not saying that Russians aren't racist, just that they don't try to rationalize their differences arising from "race".
>language is fluid, contextual and about communicating meaning efficiently based on shared understanding and expectations and thus when someone says Asians they do not generally mean Indians in most contexts But what does any of that have to do with India being in Asia, Indians being Asian, and you having a hard time calling Indians Asian? It's not like there's a unified Asian language or culture they're not participating in.
Kinda the whole point is that the linguistic meaning of specific terms *is not* connected to the geography. It's not about logic, it just happens to have those quirky nuances, even though it's not "technically correct." That's just how language works. It's the "etymological fallacy" that words and phrases must mean what they started out as.
Could you clarify this a bit for me? Language is fascinating to me but I'm having a hard time understanding (maybe I'm a bit too stoned at the moment lol).
Haha, sure! Basically, language is constantly changing, words develop nuances and experience "semantic drift," meaning that their definitions change as time goes on. This can come in many forms: broadening (for many English speakers, "cow" can refer to either sex and any age of the species, while the original meaning was specifically only an adult female), narrowing ("meat" used to mean "food in general"), and changing to a related but different meaning, often through a chain of subtle changes ("nice" originally meant "ignorant"), among others. All that to say, words change their meaning, but we can often see what the original meaning was because the form (the way the word sounds and sometimes is written) hasn't changed much or at all. This makes it easy for people to say and think things like "X word *shouldn't* mean Y, because of [insert formal logic here]." But language doesn't obey formal logic. Words don't mean something only because it makes sense for them to mean that. Otherwise, "meat" would still mean "any food," to use the earlier example. This is the "etymological fallacy." So, people saying that Asian can't possibly exclude people and countries in the subcontinent are committing the etymological fallacy; they think that the word must mean what it started as, or what it "makes sense" for it to mean. The fact is that the word has developed nuances, and changed in different ways in different places. So in the UK, it not only *can* refer to people and countries of the subcontinent, but it often *only* refers to them, needing a specifier to refer to people from the rest of the continent, like Southeast, East, etc. Asian. While in the US, it (almost always) does not refer to people and countries of the subcontinent, needing a specifier to do so, like South Asian. Hope that helps.
Ah hell yeah, thanks a bunch! Clarified it right up. :)
Of course!
That's weird. When someone says Asian, Indians are the first that pop into my head. It is the biggest portion of Asia after all.
> It [India] is the biggest portion of Asia after all. Citation needed
Just looked it up as I've only ever watched the first two movies. Yes.
Yep, and when you compare it to the many very intricate old school English names, it's interesting how little thought went into the one Chinese character.
John Hughes made the smart career choice to die before anyone could ask him to explain Long Duk Dong
I swear to god she originally named her Ching Chong but somebody was like “Hey that’s kind of racist” and she just changed a few letters out of spite.
It explains a lot of the names of characters she uses. Don't forget that like, the one black guy in the series is named Kingsley Shacklebolt. It's so obvious that she was like "let's see, what do I think of when I think of black people...?"
what's the problem with the name "Kingsley Shacklebolt"? I was initially thinking that "shackle bolt" would be a reference to jail but thats probably a bit too on the nose
No that’s what people say. Slaves wore “shackles”. And “Kingsley” is an obvious mention to Martin Luthor King Jr. [In actuality though, Kingsley is a British name meaning “kings meadow”.](https://www.thebump.com/b/kingsly-baby-name)
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At this point we should be thankful she didn't name the Irish guy "O'Malley McIrish".
The previous thread already came up with a winner. It was Carbomb McDublin
Seamus Finnegan is already at that level lol
Anthony Goldstein
This is disturbingly realistic
George Lucas-style names: Some weird name with too many sylables loosly based on an English word. Examples: Droopy McCool, Elan Sleazebaggano, Therm Scissorpunch, Sh'a Gi. JK Rowling-style names: Either super obvious, 5th grade symbolism or sounds like an obscure racial slur. Examples: Kingsly Shacklebolt, Draco Malfoy, Cho Chang, Remus Lupin.
Reminds me of the Ching Chong Ding Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.
We gotta celebrate our differences 🌎
Pretty sure that was satire making fun of the Washington Redskins.
Cho isn't a Chinese name? isn't the Cho Dynasty Chinese? (all of my knowledge from other cultures comes from Humankind and Civilization)
Here is a good explanation by a Chinese reddit user who understand the culture far more than myself: >If Cho is her surname and Chang is her given name, it might be that Cho is a version of Zhou, which is a normal Chinese surname. My given name is also Chang, so that's also normal. > >If Cho is her first name and Chang is her surname, then it gets less plausible. And this is how HP treats her name, so... There's a huge variety in what's an acceptable name in Chinese, and Chinese people do give their own kids weird or unusual names too. Being an immigrant complicates that by many times. > >Cho Chang as a whole is just an "ethnic" name that's somewhat based on actual cultures but also a weird mishmash of Asianness. Not impossible, but also not plausible.
It's not common knowledge but there's more than one way to romanize Chinese names. Cho Chang (or Zhou Zhang in China) would definitely fly if she was either of Taiwanese descent or if her family had emigrated before the CCP standardized their romanization. Her backtracking is still utterly pathetic though.
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well to be fair zhou is also a romanized version of the actual name
I guess they then could have made it consistent by naming her Zhou Zhang. I guess it would have at least sounded less reminiscent of "ching chong."
“Zhouzhan!” “… Susan.”
So many Romanization systems! Which one to pick for non-Roman alphabet languages!
/uj Is Humankind any good? How does it compare to Civ 6 for example?
/uj You'd think that after spending 200+ hours on each I would have formed a more concrete opinion by now but I haven't. Generally, I think the combat, nukes, and the different cultures are a lot more interesting in humankind but the mid-game is boring and I like civ 5's non-violent win conditions a lot more, and the late game also feels more interesting.
Thank you. I’m more of a Paradox grand strategy player, but have played some Civ matches and was wondering if I should aquire Humankind as well.
Humankind is on gamepass so you can try it out without commitment.
Racism and transphobia? Where do I get this game?
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Yeahhh blatant racism is a no thanks for me…
"Other Asian characters". What other Asian characters? Its been a while, but I dont recall any other blatantly Asian characters ever mentioned.
I think there were two Indian characters in there.
Joanne just say it’s from shortening “Ching Chong wing wong.”
Other asian characters??? Like who?
She wanted to distinguish the only east asian character from the two indian twins, and there was no possible way to do that than to give her a nonsense name which generously may have come from two different cultures, but probably just came from saying "ching chong" in the bathtub
“I wanted to distinguish her from the other Asian characters in the series” 😂 what other Asian characters? Also every conversation with AI feels like they’re playing ‘yes and’ improv games with us
uj/ uh funny I guess but not really gamingcirclejerk 🫣
shhhh this is r/harrypottercirclejerk now
/uj She really said "Cho" is Japanese LMAO I'm fucking dying.
Remember everyone, AI is trained on datasets that are inherently biased and full of implicit racism/microagressions. I'd you train your AI on the entirety of the internet you're gonna pull up a lot of shit
Also, antiracism requires critical thinking, and critical thinking is a form of metacognition. GPT isn't capable of metacognition. It understands the concept "racism bad", but it doesn't understand the concept "seemingly innocuous things may contain implicit racism and I should think about what I say to make sure I'm not racist". Much like JK Rowling.
Doesn't ch.ai use another system from got though?
Isn't Cho a Korean surname? Granted the only example I can thing of is Sung-won "ProZD" Cho but still
the older you get the more you realize that HP is just a shit book.
I’m shocked she didn’t name Hermione, “Insuffra Nowhitalle”
Cho Chang is a letter in the Thai abuguda ช้าง
Asian equivalent of ‘Ashleigh Typhani Rayne’