…or southeast Asians eating dogs…
The fact of the matter is that many cultures eat things that other cultures wouldn’t dream of touching – snakes, pork, rabbit, hamster (or was that Guinea Pig?), cow, various insects and worms…
Throw on top of that a long list of fermented or bacterialized “delicacies” and it makes the world quite interesting, to say the least.
The reality is that people will learn to make do with what is available and the modern variants may be considerably different from their early or original usage. Making fun of someone else’s food simply demonstrates a lack of worldly knowledge and an unwillingness to learn.
Well, language is one of the easy targets for demarking one group from another; separating in-group from outsider, as it were.
The simple fact of the matter is that the Chinese language does not include the |r| sound in its native word forms and, conversely, the Japanese language doesn’t include the |l| sound in its syllabary.* But since English includes both, native Chinese (or Japanese) speakers often have to struggle and retrain their tongues to be able to pronounce the sound they didn’t encounter in their own language. The struggle becomes so habitual and unconscious that a habit called overcompensation occurs, where the person will reverse the intended sound in all (or most) encounters, fripping the rettels around even when he/she knows he/she doesn’t need to do that.
The discrimination comes in not when this habit is ridiculed but when this habit is ridiculed while ignoring similar overcompensations like the |w| and |v| interchanges amongst Teutonic descendants (Germans, Dutch, etc.) or the lack of |b| and |v| distinction amongst many speakers of Spanish derivatives. And ridicule, for that matter, doesn’t belittle the victim so much as it reflects poorly on the perpetrator; it’s a lack of sympathy for those who grew up with different tongue-training and are trying to improve their ability in the local language.
–G!
No one was ever certain
What it is that he was saying
But they loved it when he told them
They were better than the rest
. --Don Henley
. Little Tin God
. Building the Perfect Beast
*Both, are considered glides, sounds produced by curling the tip of the tongue upward and letting the air/sound glide around the sides of the tongue. Touch the tip of the tongue to your lips and exhale with voicing, and you have an |l| sound. Keep doing that as you curl your tongue more and more, sliding the tip across your teeth, across the ridge behind it, and then pointing it into the cave under your hard palate. You’ll notice your |l| sound becomes more familiar, then shifts into an |r| sound.