En español: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_r5MwCOIdI
日本語で: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdxcD5RJeNM
한극어로: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7eKzsKZB_E
Hi, welcome, I'm Patrick from the United States. This is number three of the Poor Polylinguist.
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...
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Edifier S730D playin Psycho Andreas (LOUD)by GermanGamer54539 views
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