Yeah, especially Americans it seems. Some of them can barely pronounce their own names. Steve Buscemi realised he was pronouncing his wrong after going on a trip to Italy, lol.
I use a lot of local dialect words in what I say that don’t make sense out of the country or even the local area. Some people down south don’t even understand me at all, which is hilarious.
I also know Spanish as well but I need to brush up on that. It served me very well in Spain And some Portuguese and some Tetum (the language of East Timor, we have a lot of them here) too. Tetum is the easiest to learn because it’s not a Romance language. It’s like a creole language. You won’t confuse it with other languages like Spanish and Portuguese.
It’s like Diak ka lae? (How are you?) and you say it as it is. It doesn’t have polish level pronunciation either, but the speakers obviously have an Indonesian/SEA based accent because of where East Timor is.
Well, you’re deep in 1st generation issues. I know you’re not alone in thinking like that because a lot of 1st generations like to emulate their adopted country…just about as many as those that want to keep their culture alive.
I’m more like the dead end of a culture. We’re all but integrated, half the population dispersed. That’s not even remotely the same headspace: we don’t know our old culture enough to really know what we are clinging to or not, in some cases.
I don’t really want to emulate, I just want to be left alone and never be interrogated about my ethnicity/origins. Can’t I just be someone without heritage? Any heritage. Like, I’m pretty fluid in English. What if I have a bit of an accent? It doesn’t mean I have ‘heritage’/‘background’. Next time, I’ll just say, I don’t know, I was found in a crater in the ground.
Culpa is probably where we get culpable from. Which is why I recognize what this means without a lot of help. Badly translated: my fault, my fault, my maximum fault. Where I know Latin is when its like “oh, we get their word from that”, especially etymology sites.
