NRO's Krikorian on pronunciation of Sotomayor's name: "It Sticks in My Craw"
May 27, 2009 12:08 pm ET by Media Matters staff
From Mark Krikorian's May 27 post on the National Review Online's The Corner:
It Sticks in My Craw [Mark Krikorian]
Most e-mailers were with me on the post on the pronunciation of Judge Sotomayor's name (and a couple griped about the whole Latina/Latino thing - English dropped gender in nouns, what, 1,000 years ago?). But a couple said we should just pronounce it the way the bearer of the name prefers, including one who pronounces her name "freed" even though it's spelled "fried," like fried rice. (I think Cathy Seipp of blessed memory did the reverse - "sipe" instead of "seep.") 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.
For instance, in Armenian, the emphasis is on the second syllable in my surname, just as in English, but it has three syllables, not four (the "ian" is one syllable) - but that's not how you'd say it in English (the "ian" means the same thing as in English - think Washingtonian or Jeffersonian). Likewise in Russian, you put the emphasis in my name on the final syllable and turn the "o" into a schwa, and they're free to do so because that's the way it works in their language. And should we put Asian surnames first in English just because that's the way they do it in Asia? When speaking of people in Asia, okay, but not people of Asian origin here, where Mao Tse-tung would properly have been changed to Tse-tung Mao. Likewise with the Mexican practice of including your mother's maiden name as your last name, after your father's surname.
This may seem like carping, but it's not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But 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.
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I think it's called, grasping at straws people, grasping...
What we see now are the dimwits who just don't understand what racism is about.The media babblers and posters here who are drooling to jump on snippets of comments by Sotomayor and cry "racist".
The closest I can come to a translation of Sotomayor is the oldest or largest thicket or grove of trees. If she would just change it to Justice Biggestthicket, we could avoid all of this.
BTW, I spent the past few decades working with many Spanish speakers who had a lot of trouble with my first name, which contains an "ur" sound that is as difficult for Spanish speakers as rolling r's is for me.I was addressed as Chupacabra, even on paperwork, for most of those years.The mythical (?) livestock eating monster, but literally "Goatsucker", and it was cool with me.
I don't even know where to begin with this load of naive linguistic chauvinism. But perhaps one place to start would be here: there's nothing "natural" about the English language (as opposed to human linguistic capacity in general), so it's more than a bit absurd to claim that "putting the emphasis on the final syllable of" a word of foreign origin "is unnatural in English..." Yes, most three syllable words are pronounced without stress on the final syllable in standard American English. Except for the exceptions. And the words that are markedly borrowed from other languages. And, you know, people's names.
For crying out loud, Liz and Lynne Cheney cannot even publicly agree on their own preferred pronunciations of their last name. Where is Mr. Krikorian's plea for cultural conformity from them?
Finally, really, what was Mr. Krikorian smoking when he wrote this? "...[O]ne 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." Pardon me, but since when in this country's history have names been more difficult to ignore than a person's cultural, social and religious practices? Exactly what immigrant group had less attention paid to its religion, cuisine, and customs than to its unique pronunciation of words?
1. if you are too lazy to pronounce someone's name the way the prefer it pronounced, then don't talk about her!
2. This is an asinine argument about multiculturalism and assimilation because SHE'S AMERICAN! FROM THE SOUTH BRONX, NO LESS! i wonder if he would agree that we start pronouncing Coach K's name however the hell we want to. Maybe Cheney should be pronounced "Chee-nee", since that's what it spells...
The problem is that this concept is incredibly pervasive and encourages people to imagine that standardized pronunciation is somehow natural and ahistorical, and any variation from that pronunciation is an artificial and dangerous intervention by a foreign influence. It's just especially ironic that this mentality is so prevalent in the United States, where it should be obvious that standard American English is a hodgepodge of borrowings from other dialects and languages as well as its own unique contributions.