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Will Sotomayor Make Spanish An Official Language?

By Jared Taylor

"I first recall it happening in the 1980s. You could always tell who liked the Sandinistas by the way they said "NicaRAAAgua," with an exaggerated Spanish accent.

Now Spanish pronunciation is everywhere. On National Public Radio,
every Mexican name gets a rolled "R" and flat vowels.

No one does this with French or German names. Not even the wildest
Francophile would pronounce Detroit or Illinois or Lake Pontchartrain
the way the French do. But it proves you love "diversity" if you talk
about Los Angeles the way a Mexican would.

Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court wants to give us language
lessons, too. We’re not supposed to pronounce her name the way an
American would, with the accent on the first syllable and the last two
syllables rhyming with "mayor," as in the mayor of Chicago. She
insists on a Spanish pronunciation.

Zbigniew Brzezinski and Antonin Scalia don’t tell us to pronounce
their names the way their Polish or Italian ancestors did. They are
Americans and understand the way Americans speak.

Not Sonia. As she keeps telling us, although she is American-born, she
is a “Latina”—forget that English dispensed with this type of gender
distinction a thousand years ago—and she wants to remind us of this
every time we hear her name.

It wasn’t all that long ago that people wanted to fit in, and changed
their names to sound more American. Ralph Lauren was born Ralph
Lif****z and campus radical Mark Rudd started life as Mark Rudnitsky.
Volodymyr Palahniuk made things a lot easier for himself by switching
to Jack Palance.

Of course, no one wants to fit into America any more, not even someone
who wants to sit on the Supreme Court. We have to adjust to them, not
the other way around.

At the same time, this pronunciation fad is an attempt to sneak
Spanish in the back door as a sort of official language—or at least to
exempt Spanish names from the Anglicizing process other names go
through. Like "Press 1 for English," this is just one more result of
having let 40 million Hispanics come live here.

The Chinese have been pushing us around, too. We’re not supposed to
talk about Peking or Canton anymore. They are Beijing and Guangzhou.
The Communists changed the spelling after they took over in 1949, but
only started bullying Westerners about it in the 1980s.

The Chinese claim the new spellings sound more like the way the
Chinese themselves pronounce the name. So what? English-speakers have
certain names for certain places and we have used them for centuries.
Munich isn’t even spelled the same as München and Florence doesn’t
sound much like Firenze, but the Germans and the Italians don’t ask us
to change. If the French told us to start calling their capital Paree
we would laugh at them.

The Japanese have their own names for things, too. They use the same
characters as the Chinese but pronounce them differently. So they are
the only people in the world who talk about Moh Taku-toh and Sho Kai-
seki rather than Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek.

The Chinese don’t like that but the Japanese speak Japanese, not
Chinese. And Nancy Pelosi could live in Japan all her life but never
be anything but Nahnshee Pehroshee.

Like the Japanese, the French have their own ideas about how our names
should be pronounced. Our last president was Zhorzh Boosh, and he
lived in la Maison Blanche, not the White House. To them, New England
is Nouvelle Angleterre and South Carolina is Caroline du Sud.

And do you think Mexicans ever go to New York? No, they go to Nuevo
York. In 2001, Hispanic legislators introduced a bill in the New
Mexico state house officially to change the state’s name to Nuevo
Mexico. When the bill never made it out of committee, sponsor Miguel
Garcia blamed "covert racism." [Lawmaker Suggests Racism To Blame
After New State Name Axed, By S. U. Mahesh, Albuquerque Journal,
February 14, 2001]

Americans speak English, and not just any kind of English. We don’t
talk about lorries and lifts, and we don’t twist our mouths into funny
shapes just because foreigners tell us to.

Why should this Supreme Court nominee get special treatment? Keep
pronouncing her name the way an American would.

If someone corrects you, ask him "What’s the capital of Japan? When he
says "Tokyo" (and it won’t sound like the way the Japanese say it)
explain to him: "Obviously you don’t speak Japanese. I don’t speak
Puerto Rican."

Ihttp://www.vdare.com/taylor/090602_sotomayor.htm

[Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!]

On Jun 3, 1:50*am, wrote:
*Will Sotomayor Make Spanish An Official Language?

Si.

Buenos noches, senor!

What an idiot. LOL!

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On Jun 3, 2:13�am, "Shhhh! I'm Listening to Reason!"
wrote:
On Jun 3, 1:50�am, wrote:

�Will Sotomayor Make Spanish An Official Language?

Si.

Buenos noches, senor!

What an idiot. LOL!

El Bratzio es muy tonto, verdad? Pinche pendejo.