New Zealand 19

Listen to New Zealand 19, a 46-year-old man from Auckland, New Zealand. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 46

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 01/06/1970

PLACE OF BIRTH: Gisborne, New Zealand (but raised in Auckland)

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Caucasian/New Zealander

OCCUPATION: university professor

EDUCATION: Ph.D

AREAS OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

Subject moved to Auckland, New Zealand, at the age of 5 and lived there until age 24. He then lived in England for one year, Hong Kong for four years, and Sydney, Australia, for seven years, before settling in Southern California, in the United States, where had he been living for 10 years at the time of this interview.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

Subject speaks fluent Chinese.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Jeremy Mercado (under supervision of David Nevell)

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 09/03/2017

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

OK, well I was born in Gisborne, which is a pretty — I mean they call it a city by New Zealand standards, but it’s only got — I can’t remember — 40, 50 thousand people. So, it wouldn’t be called a city over here. But we left when I was 5. So I have a few memories of there. But we lived out in the country. I remember there were cattle yards, fields; sort of my memories are all sort of very rural. Then when we were 5, we moved to Auckland, which is the big city, which is a million people, which is by New Zealand standards very big. Um, and then we had a pretty settled existence there. My, my parents moved out of home. They waited ’til, uh, uh, me — the youngest kid — was 18, and then they moved out of home. Rather then waiting for us to leave, they said four sons — we’ve had enough. So they moved out, and we had, had to find our own way.

Um, and, uh, so New Zealand was all right. We went to the local high school, local intermediate school. You guys call it a middle school, local high school. They were nothing; they were nothing special; you know, they weren’t elite high schools. We just went to the one that we were zoned for. But it was fun; ya, you know could walk or bike to all of them and made some good friends there and had quite a fun. Had pretty good memories of growing up as a as a teenager and, um, then. Yeah, actually differences to America: I can definitely see some. There was a — I noticed my wife actually said when we went to New Zealand — compared to the play-, the playgrounds in New Zealand are much more dangerous, which means they’re much more fun. Ya know, the kids get to play and have adventures and, and do stuff. Even school, even playtime in the school grounds, ya know, at lunchtime and stuff like that are less supervised. It’s funny: I, um, I signed up on Facebook to something called, uh, uh, um, “New Zealanders in USA,” like a Facebook page. And, ya know, people commenting their experiences, and some New Zealanders were talking about being back in New Zealand for a few months and having put their kids in and commenting just how unsupervised playtime was. So the only time the teachers intervened, ya know, if it actually got to full-on fighting; um, then the teachers would sort of come out and intervene. But except for that, the kids were just, ya know, on their own, do what they like, organizing games like bull rush.

The game of bull rush goes like this: You have one person who stands in the middle of the field, and everybody lines on the side. And that person picks out somebody, and their job is to make it to the other side of the field. And the person who picked them out: It’s their job to stop them — at any means, and there are no rules; just one person has to get to the other side of the field; the other person has to stop them. If the person succeeds in stopping them, they’re now a team and there’s two of them, and they pick out another person, and so on and so on until somebody gets through. Sometimes nobody gets through, but eventually at a certain point, usually when somebody makes it through, you call “bull rush!” And everybody runs for the other side of the field, and the people who are catching just try to bring as many people to the ground as they can, in which case now you might have ten people in the middle catching, and the game keeps going until there’s nobody left to run and everybody’s been caught, and it’s kinda violent — ya know, as you can imagine, yeah? People just try to charge from one side of the field to the other, and I was delighted to hear that kids still play bull rush. I thought maybe, you know, they had gone in and banned it because it was — oh, it wasn’t safe or something like that, but it was a great game; we loved it.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Jeremy Mercado (under supervision of David Nevell)

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 09/03/2017

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

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