 masbury says: Good, solid reasons to be irked by a SCOTUS candidate. "Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English... and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn't be giving in to."An "unnatural" pronunciation? Oh, I can't WAIT until my Mexican husband sees this one. Boniface? Boniface? Well, they are right, since it's So-to-MA-yor. Pure bigotry! Notice, saying French words properly is a sign of an education, but it's different if the ethnic group is one English speaking people dislike. It seems pronouncing Spanish correctly, is just beneath some people. I have a Hispanic last name and I can't count the number of times I've tried to correct someone's pronunciation of it, only to have them say, "whatever." Hell, even I can't "correctly" pronounce my German (Pomeranian, actually, I think) surname. So what? There's no sound in English like it. If I were to meet boniface in person, I'd make an attempt to learn to pronounce the name correctly by asking him about it and would hope that he'd take that as a respectful effort, but in the long run there are much bigger fish to fry than me learning to twist my tongue in the precise way a native speaker of the language does. If I'm serving someone where this is a question my goal is always to have them feel that I've given them my respect through my actions, which as the saying goes, speak much louder than my words. Frequency of use (beyond t... "I'd make an attempt to learn to pronounce the name correctly by asking him about it"Thank you. That's all anyone can ask. My last name IS a difficult one to say correctly, as it contains a dipthong and a rolled double "r." My problem is with the people who won't even make the effort, even if the name is an easy one. The attitude seems to be, "It's Spanish and I can't be bothered." I even wrote to the news team in our area, which is San Antonio and has a population that is 51% Hispanic, just to be told, "we'll pronounce Spanish names the way WE feel is right" (not the way they're actually pronounced). It really sends a message that Hispanics aren't worth the trouble. Krikorian seems to be blind to the irony of somebody named "Krikorian" criticizing somebody else for having an "unAmerican" name.  I think it's just basic manners and civility to pronounce somebody's name as they want it to be pronounced, to the best of your ability. There are some sounds that you may never learn to pronounce correctly if you didn't grow up saying them – heck, you may never even learn to hear the difference. I once heard someone who was the US-born child of Punjabi parents grumbling about how their parents would tell them they were saying the Punjabi alphabet wrong: "It's not tata, it's tata!" Um... what?  You can usually tell if somebody is ... LOL, Lexica - good point. Up the road from me there is the Vlcko family, of Czech descent, who've been Americans by birth far longer than I have. I went to school with Jay Krasciuski and Linda Klopfenstein. Yet another hearty irony can be found in the fact that Spanish is far more straightforward to pronounce than English. You wouldn't find disparities in Spanish like slough and rough and Houghton. Anybody with two years of Spanish study can pronounce nearly any Spanish name correctly. But how does one say "Houghton?" I can pronounce my Slavic last name "correctly" (i.e., according to how it would be said in the Old Country) but I choose to Anglicize it. I have not, however, changed the spelling (despite its being a pain in the butt) and am rather pleased with its meaning (roughly translated, it means "son of a barbarian invader"). This is just another bit of baiting, as when the wingnuts insist on calling the Democratic Party the "Democrat Party" |
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