A thousand curses on Kevin Drum for making me read some idiocy from the National Review's attempts to find things wrong with Sonia Sotomayor:
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.
As someone whose last name is "unnaturally" pronounced with the emphasis on the final syllable (we say "OrZELL," not "ORzel"), let me offer a hearty "go fuck yourself" to Mark Krikorian. And some more curses to Kevin Drum for causing me to read this nonsense in the first place. Now I need to go scrub my eyeballs to get the stupid off.
- Log in to post comments
Krikorian, as in crook-or-ee-ANNE
and he made Olbermann's Worst Person in the World
Actually, I heard it's pronounced crack-WHORE-ian.
Seriously. How freaking self-absorbed do you have to be to tell someone that they pronounce their own name wrongly?
Nothing that happens in the US makes sense unless you first consider the racial angle.
SotomayOR (and also OrZEL) sounds spanish. It's that simple - the brown hordes from the south and all that. Dog-whistle racism.
LOL When I first saw this I thought your post was titled "Put the EmPATHY ..." I did notice that Obama didn't once use the word empathy when introducing judge Sotomayor. I hope it wasn't because he caved and let the troglodytes have ownership of the word. Maybe I'm just being paranoid.
Well, that kind of rule has the advantage of putting everyone with Semitic names in their places, too (perhaps that's where the Spaniards got the habit.) Not to mention a lot of Northern European names.
Hmmm. Come to think of it, about the only nationality it doesn't flip off is -- English!
Letting English-speakers decide about pronunciation is like letting creationists decide about science.
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 â "sipe" instead of "seep.")
This is a great example of this man's complete ignorance - you'd think a even racist fucknozzle might be aware that in German, "ie" is pronounced "ee" and "ei" is pronounced "eye". Does he think these people are just being contrary? Is he calling Sotomayor "Soda-meyer"? It's really not that hard. We incorporate new words all the time in English, with strange and varied pronounciations.
Should I insist on my God-given right as an American to tell Englishmen named Anthony that, in my view, the "t" in their names ought not to be silent?
What if my grandma called him "Krik-Korean"? She would. She would be incorrect. He would be within he rights to correct her. He, in fact, instructs the hapless reader in this very post on how to pronounce his name! He gives the Russians a pass, sure, because apparently Russians are too stupid to figure out how to say Armenian names or something. Dumbass.
Oh, good lord, he really is arguing that we should call her Sodameyer. Like Niedermeyer. (Note the "ie" - it's not Nidermeyer.)
Oops, sorry, that should have said "tell Englishmen named Anthony that the 'h' in their names ought not to be silent".
I extend this to people named Thomas and Therese.
Good grief. Xenophobic entitlement at its finest. I think this is merely an extension of "all those foreigners ought to learn proper English" nonsense that was the motivation for Congress to finally mandate that English was the official language.
My last name seems to be virtually impossible for non-German speakers, so I try to cut people some slack. But when they don't even make the effort, I confess to sometimes intentionally butchering their names in response.
I've seen several citations to this hit piece, and I commend you for reading it so I don't have to. Executive summary: the author is a racist idiot.
In Spanish, the default stress is determined by the last letter, and any exceptions are marked with an explicit accent. Any consonant other than N or S means stress the last syllable. N, S, or a vowel means stress the penultimate syllable. That makes Spanish easier than almost any other polysyllabic language, since often the exceptions are not explicitly marked. Your surname, assuming it wasn't shortened at some point, is an exception, because the default in Slavic languages is to stress the penultimate syllable.
Sadly, there is significant precedent. I am so used to calling the capital of Germany BerLIN that it took me a long time to figure out (and it still gobsmacks me) that the New Hampshire city of the same name (because it was named after the German original) is pronounced BERlin. It's apparently one of many cases in the US where the people who named the place had seen the city name in writing but never heard it pronounced.
My brother, Darius, used to be told by his teachers that his name was supposed to be pronounced Dar-EYE-us, not DAR-ee-us, because Webster's dictionary said that's how it was supposed to be.
So he once said, no, both pronunciations are "wrong," as Persians would say neither, and then told them what the real pronunciation is.
Has he commented on Brett Favre?