Miss En Soo Yang, my two cents

I read the controversial thread on the Miss En Soo Yang character.

I'm going to add some non-controversial opinion.

I'm so impressed by the fact that Miss En Soo Yang and the Lieutenant Colonel Hess character both pronounced, YANG, correctly according to Chinese and Korean, which is pronounced, "yawng", not pre-supposed, "yang" that an English-speaking person would assume. And that's nothing against the English speaker. They don't know better. "Yang" is the sixth most common surname in China. It is also a surname in Korea. In mandarin Chinese, YANG is pronounced sort of like, 'yawng', as mandarin is flowing, melodic tongue. Now however, Cantonese Chinese - spoken by some 400 million southern Chinese - is a much harsher dialect by comparison. A cantonese speaker would pronounce YANG more like, 'yong'.

Here is the origin of the confusion. The vast majority of Chinese immigrants into America over a hundred years ago and into the 20th century were Cantonese. A cantonese Chinese by the surname of, YANG, would pronounce it like, YONG, to an American immigration official, who would promptly write, YOUNG, on the immigrant's paperwork. That is the origin of the Chinese, 'Young' surname in America.

Today in 2012, should a Chinese person of the surname, 'Yang' from Beijing come to the USA as a student, he or she would write the English, 'Yang' on their paperwork and pronounce their name, 'yawng'. It would be incorrect to pronounce their last name as, 'yang'. Of course the Chinese characters for YANG is totally foreign since it is not based on a phonetic alphabet.

By the way, in China, YANG means, 'willow', or, 'poplar' tree. Tell that to a Chinese person of that last name and you will impress them mightily.