Surgery to Look "More Western"?

ucsd_ucla_dad
Wed, 25 May 2011 19:14:41 +0000

While this eye surgery for bigger looking eyes may seem odd to many of us, don’t many of us use cosmetics, etc, to make our western eyes look bigger.

I guess a difference is that the stated purpose of this surgery is to make the person appear more like a race other than their own for some perceived benefit. This is beyond whatever reasons ladies find for applying all that eye makeup (which I frankly don’t like and ‘don’t get’ but I’m just a male).

On the pronunciation of the 'L’s - this is a brain issue - not a physical issue. It’s been proven that if one grows to the age of 3 or so in an environment where certain sounds aren’t made, then apparently synaptic connections in the brain aren’t made which would enable the person to easily make those sounds so when they try to learn those sounds much later in life they’ll have a very difficult time of it and may never get it down. This was studied with Japanese making the ‘L’ sound, non-Basgues being able to make sounds unique to that language, and others not being able to make the unique sounds used by certain African tribes.

If the same young kid is taken out of that environment at an early age (before 3 or so) to the culture where the sounds are pronounced then the kid has no problem at all with the sound. It’s not a physical thing with the tongue or anything the person can really help. The proof of this is all around us with the Americans born to parents of Japanese or Korean descent.

I work with a lot of Japanese and they definitely have the issue of mixing up ‘R’ and ‘L’ sounds and spellings but that’s no fault of theirs. And when I’ve tried to say some Japanese words back to them which to my ear sounded exactly the way they said the words, they usually couldn’t understand me because apparently I wasn’t making the sounds quite correctly.