OMG!!! He canNOT be serious!
Wow… I am flabbergasted:
First Mark Krikorian steps in it bigtime with this:
So, are we supposed to use the Spanish pronunciation, so-toe-my-OR, or the natural English pronunciation, SO-tuh-my-er, like Niedermeyer? The president pronounced it both ways, first in Spanish, then after several uses, lapsing into English. Though in the best “Pockiston” tradition, he also rolled his r’s in Puerto Rico.
and then, when apparently challenged on his idiocy, writes up another ugly piece to put the other foot into the mess:
Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference), unlike my correspondent’s simple preference for a monophthong over a diphthong, and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.
* * *
. . . one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that’s not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there’s a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.
This is just bullshit. You pronounce a person’s name the way the owner of the name pronounces it. Period. If your tongue is so retarded you can’t pronounce a name correctly, that’s YOUR problem. You don’t get to force an “Americanization” onto someone else’s name. It is simply NOT difficult to pronounce so-toe-mah-YOR, and only a genuine ASS would make an issue of it, blaming the owner of the name rather than admitting his own inability to pronounce a name.
Small wonder Keith named Krikorian nailed him to the wall last night as “Worst Person in the World”
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How do you feel about this? Should people coming to this country, or 2nd or 3d generations in this country, be forced to change their names or the pronunciation of their names? Does society actually have the right to expect someone to stop being who they really are? A person’s real name (and, imagine that, their sexual orientation) is a part of that person’s fundamental identity and cannot be changed, and a change should not be forced on a person, just to make other people comfortable. And particularly for Sonia Sotomayor, who has been in public all these years and everyone else pronouncing her name just fine.
Ray,
Quite correct.
I get irritated when people make no effort to learn how to pronounce my last name. (Gerencser, Grr IN sir) I can even tell them and they still say whatever……….It is disrespectful AND lazy.
I remember eating at a Chinese restaurant where the owner had all the staff use an English name. I told our waitress I wanted to know HER name and that’s what we were going to call her. She was shocked that anyone cared.
Supposedly we are a melting pot, yes?
Even within the English language we have regional dialect differences. Imagine my surprise when I moved to Bexar county Texas to find out it was pronounced Bear.(indian) Or Lancaster. in Ohio it is lancaster (ca being kuh, all slurred together. In Pennsylvania it is LAN caster. Respect is learning the language and its peculiarities.
We better come to terms with the fact that each day our population becomes more and more Hispanic. Learning a bit of Spanish might not hurt any of us. (and them learning English too)
My Hungarian grandparents died in the 1960’s without knowing very much English. How I wish the family had kept the Hungarian language alive. Sadly, it died with them.
Bruce
May 28th, 2009 at 2:21 pmMark Krikorian is a fucking jerkwad.
“And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there’s a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.”
Wouldn’t want to give up white dominion. Fuck borders. Fuck nationalists and their fucking imperial decrees. And fuck Mark Krikorian. Mark, this is everyone’s fucking planet, we were all born on it. You better get used to the idea of people who are not white male heterosexual dominators taking back power. You fucking sniveling lily-white fuck, you!
May 28th, 2009 at 7:23 pmSome people just have names that cannot be tackled with a western palate without quite a bit of retraining. I agree that ‘requiring’ someone to change their name to go easy on Americans is too much. Sotomayor is an easy one. No excuses for mangling it, but what about Chac Uayab Xoc? Are you prepared to get up in front of the group and tackle that one without some practice?
June 3rd, 2009 at 9:53 amIt is an issue of pragmatism. If someone just cannot handle correcting well-meaning people trying to say their name, they dumb it down for them. If they want to stick to their original name, then they and the one trying to say it have to suffer through it. And it all gets done.