Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Learning from Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a great and splendid thing. Today I was looking up "Tagalog" since I recently came across this video of Cebuano prisoners dancing to Michael Jackson's "Thriller," and I wanted to know more about this language that's been so heavily influenced by other languages.

As usual, I couldn't help myself from clicking on link after link, and I learned some interesting stuff along the way.

1. The Philippines is home to the largest Eurasian population, with over 2.5 million of us. The United States trails in at a distance second with around 700,00, and, to my surprise, nay, shock, China is ranked third with over 660,000. That means China has more Eurasians than Japan as well as Thailand and Singapore. I find this highly suspect, although I assume Hong Kong is included in China's figure, and, perhaps more significantly, they're including the numbers of part-European minority ethnicities of China. Incidentally, the Philippines is also home to the world's second-largest population of Americans (behind only the U.S. itself). Sudden fascination with the Philippines; I'm not sure why.
2. Furthermore, an American sitcom that ran in the late '60s to early '70s by the name of "Love is a Many Splendored Thing" featured a half-Korean, half-white protagonist. The character was played by a Eurasian actress by the name of Nancy Hsueh, but after a year was written out of the script because the portrayal of the character's relationship with a white man spelled an interracial relationship on television, which was apparently too controversial and, in fact, offended some people.

1 comment:

Erica Lee said...

dude, i just got started google reader, and it's amazing and has already changed my life. i've added your blog and now i'm spending like ALL AFTERNOON reading all the shit on your blog. this is a CHOICE blog. so much information! i seriously haven't done any work in an hour b/c i'm so involved in this blog. so many links! so many facts! so much to contemplate! i could write a blog entry on your blog. that's how great your blog is.

erica lee!