>358 No disrespect or parody is intended with the phonetic
>rendering of this character's accent. It's just the way a lot of
>people who run Chinese restaurants of my experience tend to talk in
>English.

It might be more accurate to say that they're speaking Chinese, but using English words to do it. Since Chinese and English both have positional grammar, it's something they can latch onto pretty readily; since Chinese is as utterly devoid of grammatical inflection (verb conjugation and noun declension) as English is of tones, that's something they don't incorporate into their speech as readily, especially when it's not strictly necessary to get their point across. (Chinese is rather admirable in that -- it's a very efficient language.)

Singlish -- that's Singaporean English -- is this taken to the next level; if you hear English on the street, it's often spoken with Chinese grammar and syntax, and incorporates a lot of borrowed Hokkien and Malay, and calques from Hokkien slang. It may or may not be opaque to Americans, depending on how deep the Singlish is. (My wife reverts to Singlish when she speaks to her mother on the phone -- it's quite interesting to listen to.)

- Sean
"All tribal myths are true, for a given value of 'true.'"
-- Terry Pratchett, from _The Last Continent_