How do you tell apart from different yet similar races

[James420]

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh

[davidals]

Originally Posted by YtownGuy

I'm tempted to be a little silly and say "How do I tell different races apart? Badly!"

Over the years I've developed a certain "radar" for telling ethnic groups apart, and I'll be the first to admit that it isn't flawless. The city where I live has a significant Italian-American population. After you meet your first few hundred Italian-Americans, you develop a certain sense for spotting them in a crowd and can distinguish them from Greek-Americans, for example.

With so many people here with mixed ancestries, it's not easy to do.

I think I've gotten a bit of the same thing, from a lot of random things in life: I've worked in customer service in a very heavily multi-ethnic univeristy town, I have several biracial cousins (African American/Irish, African American/Korean, African American/Mexican), so there are a lot of varied ethnic backgrounds in the family-and-friends circle through most of my life. My dad lived in South Korea for 5 years, and I grew up with Korean family friends, and there's a few other family members who have lived in places like Jamaica, Lebanon, Greece and The Philippines at points during the 1970s and 80s.

The two things I try to keep in mind:

#1 - "Latino" and "Hispanic" are vague, generic invented terms. Natives of Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Puerto Rico or Chile speak a common language, and have some common history, but Latin America (which is a cultural region, NOT a continent) is extremely diverse. Brazil (for example) has the 2nd largest accumulation of people of Japanese ancestry (after Japan) in the world, and their roots in Brazil go back 3-4 generations...so what do you call them? Asian? Latino? You will find African ancestry as a majority in lots of Latin America, Native American elsewhere, mostly European in other places - lotsa blonde/blue-eyed in Argentina. There are Jewish and Asian-ancestry populations in several of the major cities in Latin America: Havana, Mexicali, Lima, Buenos Aires and several other places have sizable historic Chinatowns, and some of the oldest Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere (as in, older than those in the U.S.).

#2 - Which brings me to the second thing. Hearing people speak their own language is a great way of sensing the differences, for whatever reason you might need to. There are three huge language groups in E Asia: (1) Thai/Khmer/Lao/Malay, (2) all the Chinese languages [Cantonese, Mandarin, Sichuanese, et. al.], and (3) The Altaic languages [Japanese, Korean, Mongolian]. Within those groups, those languages sound a bit similar, but across the boundary between those groups they don't: Japanese and Mandarin sound about as similar as (say) English and Russian. To me it's tough to explain how different they sound - I don't speak either, but I can instantly tell them apart, and this is useful, as there are lots of Chinese AND Japanese here in the NC Triangle area, and historically Chinese and Japanese are often a bit touchy about being mistaken for the other.

Just in hearing them spoken, Japanese sounds learnable - I can hear the rhythm and order in it - the short, measured syllables and everything-ending-in-a-vowel quality. The Chinese languages sound far, far more challenging. The SE Asian languages - Thai in particular - sound just impossible.

[Javen1]

Originally Posted by davidals

I think I've gotten a bit of the same thing, from a lot of random things in life: I've worked in customer service in a very heavily multi-ethnic univeristy town, I have several biracial cousins (African American/Irish, African American/Korean, African American/Mexican), so there are a lot of varied ethnic backgrounds in the family-and-friends circle through most of my life. My dad lived in South Korea for 5 years, and I grew up with Korean family friends, and there's a few other family members who have lived in places like Jamaica, Lebanon, Greece and The Philippines at points during the 1970s and 80s.

The two things I try to keep in mind:

#1 - "Latino" and "Hispanic" are vague, generic invented terms. Natives of Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Puerto Rico or Chile speak a common language, and have some common history, but Latin America (which is a cultural region, NOT a continent) is extremely diverse. Brazil (for example) has the 2nd largest accumulation of people of Japanese ancestry (after Japan) in the world, and their roots in Brazil go back 3-4 generations...so what do you call them? Asian? Latino? You will find African ancestry as a majority in lots of Latin America, Native American elsewhere, mostly European in other places - lotsa blonde/blue-eyed in Argentina. There are Jewish and Asian-ancestry populations in several of the major cities in Latin America: Havana, Mexicali, Lima, Buenos Aires and several other places have sizable historic Chinatowns, and some of the oldest Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere (as in, older than those in the U.S.).

#2 - Which brings me to the second thing. Hearing people speak their own language is a great way of sensing the differences, for whatever reason you might need to. There are three huge language groups in E Asia: (1) Thai/Khmer/Lao/Malay, (2) all the Chinese languages [Cantonese, Mandarin, Sichuanese, et. al.], and (3) The Altaic languages [Japanese, Korean, Mongolian]. Within those groups, those languages sound a bit similar, but across the boundary between those groups they don't: Japanese and Mandarin sound about as similar as (say) English and Russian. To me it's tough to explain how different they sound - I don't speak either, but I can instantly tell them apart, and this is useful, as there are lots of Chinese AND Japanese here in the NC Triangle area, and historically Chinese and Japanese are often a bit touchy about being mistaken for the other.

Just in hearing them spoken, Japanese sounds learnable - I can hear the rhythm and order in it - the short, measured syllables and everything-ending-in-a-vowel quality. The Chinese languages sound far, far more challenging. The SE Asian languages - Thai in particular - sound just impossible.

malay doesn't sound anything like lao/khmer/thai

in fact malay is more similar to filipino and indonesian

[Mike1306]

Originally Posted by Javen1

hmmm I don't consider people who are half non-asian half filipino as representative of the common filipino..so I still don't think the common filipino looks latino....which was the point of the argument

that would be like someone claiming I think thai people can look african american...and then posting a picture of Tiger Woods to prove your theory

I am not going to continue in circles with this. You keep adding more and more factors when the original post by me was plain and simple that I agreed with the other poster that some Filipino can look like some Hispanics.

You even admitted that some Filipinos could look somewhat Hispanic but now you want to start bringing up whether they are full blood, half blood, common, etc. and no, my post never stated common Filipino, just that some can and do look Hispanic.

Mike said

I would agree with the other poster that some Filipinos can be mistaken for Latinos.

Javen said

the only filipinos who fit the hispanic looking profile are the ones who are eurasian

Seems we said basically the same thing.

[Javen1]

Originally Posted by Mike Peterson

I am not going to continue in circles with this. You keep adding more and more factors when the original post by me was plain and simple that I agreed with the other poster that some Filipino can look like some Hispanics.

You even admitted that some Filipinos could look somewhat Hispanic but now you want to start bringing up whether they are full blood, half blood, common, etc. and no, my post never stated common Filipino, just that some can and do look Hispanic.

Mike said
Javen said

Seems we said basically the same thing.

okay I agree that half bloode pinoys could look latino...lets leave it there