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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

> People who pay attention to politics are probably familiar with the late Senator Gyang Nyam Shom Pwajok. Names can’t get more Chinese than that!

That does not even remotely sound Chinese. Korean, maybe.

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Gyang Nyam definitely sounds Korean (thanks to that old meme), but then Shom Pwajok is less discernable -- it's like a hint of Thai or some other southeast Asian language.

I would have guessed Shom Pwajok was a Polish Jew.

While they could be valid Korean syllables, they don't sound like Korean names, either. The only words containing "gyang" or "nyam" I can think of are slangs or onomatopoeia, and I don't think I've seen "shom" or "pwa" in the wild.

> Shok Jok. That name could pass for a Mandarin or Cantonese name.

These sounds do not exist in Mandarin. This would never be, or sound like, a Mandarin name. And no mention is made of tones, which are critical in Mandarin.

The article already smelled of a bovid's feces, but at this point I actually saw the bullshit.

These sounds sounds more like a Southern Chinese language, not Mandarin. Mandarin has highly simplified set of finals (essentially /n/, /ng/ and /r/) which cannot even combine freely with most vowels. But Southern Chinese languages preserve a more complex final system.

I still don't think "Shok Jok" sounds very much Chinese (It mostly sounds American English[1] to me), but YMMV.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_jock

Yeah, this felt like a Gell-Mann moment

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