Linkmeister

Ineffable, effable, effanineffable

In a post titled "It Sticks in My Craw" a guy named Krikorian at National Review's The Corner says Judge Sotomayor's name is too hard to pronounce correctly:

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.

Not content with that foolishness, he goes on:

. . .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.

There you have it, folks. A guy with an Armenian last name (that last syllable, he tells us, is properly "yun," not "e-un," by the way) is objecting to a Puerto Rican pronouncing her name the way it's supposed to be pronounced in its language of origin. And it's all because of (gasp!) multiculturalism!

I don't know where Krikorian lives, but if it's anywhere on the Eastern seaboard or the West Coast, he surely ought to be used to people whose names don't conform to white-bread American stereotypes.

Where on earth do these people come from?

Posted by Linkmeister at May 27, 2009 09:31 AM | TrackBack