About Me
- Jason S.
- Graduate student in Linguistics and French Linguistics. Native of Connecticut.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
How to pronounce Sotomayor
Why should we do this, according to Krikorian?
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.
Of course, Sotomayor is not the one insisting that everyone else pronounce her name the way she does (or if she does, she has not publicly chided the media for frequent Anglicization of her name). Moreover, Sotomayor is not a newcomer. She is of Puerto Rican descent and was born in the United States. If she chooses to continue to pronouncing her last name the way her ancestors did, that is of course her right. And it is up to those of us who refer to her to decide about how much we wish adhere to her pronunciation, as is always the case with dealing with foreign names and words. Some will automatically defer to how the source of the name or word pronounces it, others will seek to have the word conform to the prosody (roughly "speech melody and rhythm") and phonotactics (how sounds can(not) combine in a language) of whatever language they are speaking. To insist that people choose one or the other is both pointless and intrusive. As the name gets batted around more and more, eventually a normative pronunciation or two will emerge and language will take care of itself.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Arab family men
In the above clip, a woman express fear that Obama is an Arab. Senator McCain corrects her by saying that he's not an Arab, he's a family man.
So are there no Arab family men?
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Mean or infelicitous?
Saturday, August 2, 2008
McCain’s principal problem
In a recent post on the left-wing political blog ThinkProgress (I will not abbreviate its name to TP, as they do, because of the unsavory connotations that TP has...), they stated that recent statements by John McCain followed by assertions from his staffers indicates that McCain does not always speak for the McCain campaign. The statements in question (for this post at least--two other incidents are cited in an update) concern the presumptive Republican nominee’s stance on raising the payroll tax in order to remedy any shortfalls that Social Security might otherwise face in the future. Senator McCain told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, “There is nothing that’s off the table.” Later, McCain spokesperson Tucker Bounds told Megyn Kelly of Fox News “No, Megyn, there is no imaginable circumstance where John McCain would raise payroll taxes. It’s absolutely out of the question.”
Politically, this could be bad news for McCain. If he cannot project an image of being in control, or projects an image that his advisors know more than he does, he runs the risk of playing into characterizations that he is little different from the current President.
I haven’t seen similar criticisms of Barack Obama’s campaign, but the Jeremiah Wright controversy of a few months ago also had a footing that seems increasingly common in U.S. politics. In that case, the pastor of Obama’s church, and a man who Obama said had been influential in getting him to become a Christian, had been caught making incendiary remarks about America, the most (in)famous being “God damn America!” It is uncontroversial that Wright was both the author and the animator of those comments, but the question was, Who was the principal? Many people shifted the blame to Obama, demanding that he repudiate those comments, suggesting that he was, in some way, a principal of the harsh words (not necessarily THE principal, however).
It seems that many politicians are becoming the principals for what their friends and associates say, even when those people are not members of the campaign organization. Whether this is a negative development (“Now I’m not only responsible for what I say, but for what my friends say too?”) or not (“When people who are important to you make public statements, the public ought to know if you share those beliefs”) is a matter of social perspective, not linguistic. For now, I think the question of how this footing plays out is sufficiently fascinating.