I have a weird last name. Spelled, Fecke, it’s pronounced \fek’-ē\, with a long e at the end.1 But given that it’s unusual, I’m not put off by any of the odd variants people will use when they first meet me, even if it’s my favorite weird one, \fēk\.
But while I’m very tolerant of mispronunciations of my name on first meetings, I don’t know what I would think if I corrected the pronunciation and was told, in all seriousness, “Well, \fek’-ē\ isn’t a standard English pronunciation in my book. I’m going to stick with \fek\.” I think I would probably back away slowly from the idiot, immediately convinced that this was a person I need not deal with ever again.
Enter Mark Kirkorian, who is a person we need not deal with ever again. He wondered yesterday whether Sonia Sotomayor’s last name wasn’t, well, too ethnic for us to pronounce correctly:
So, are we supposed to use the Spanish pronunciation, so-toe-my-OR, or the natural English pronunciation, SO-tuh-my-er, like Niedermeyer? The president pronounced it both ways, first in Spanish, then after several uses, lapsing into English. Though in the best “Pockiston” tradition, he also rolled his r’s in Puerto Rico.
Horrors! Barack Obama pronounced Sonia Sotomayor’s name correctly! What’s next, he goes to a Mexican restaurant and doesn’t order “Gwack-uh-mohl” on his “Fuhjeytuhs?” Why can’t he pronounce it like the good old English name Niedermeyer, which means “Name which is German?”
Not content with asking whether we shouldn’t mispronounce Sonia Sotomayor’s name deliberately, Kirkorian decided to take it to the next level:
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.
[…]
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.
Really? Because that’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard of. Unlike French, which is policed rigorously by grammarians, English (and especially American English) is a polyglot mixture of French and other Romance languages, Norse and other Germanic languages, Gaelic and other Celtic languages, and any other word that’s been hoovered into the language over its long history. Our sentence structure is ad hoc, our vocabulary voluminous. The language that we call English has assimilated words and structure from pretty much every language it’s come across over the years, and that’s the language’s great strength.
So Judge Sotomayor pronounces her name \sō-tō-mī-yor’\? So what? It’s unusual in English to stress the final syllable of a polysyllabic word, but it isn’t unheard of. There’s not a rule in English that wasn’t made to be broken. That’s one of the grand things about the language — that it simply adapts as new loan words and loan names are brought in. Oh, sure, there’s some Anglicization going on — I’m not going to attempt to roll the r on Sotomayor, because as a native American English speaker, I really can’t — but I can at least approximate the pronunciation, and get the stress on the right syllable. After all, it’s only neighborly to try to pronounce a name the way it’s pronounced. Real Americans are supposed to be neighborly — something Kirkorian evidently doesn’t understand.
(Via Steve Benen)
- Ironically, given the topic of this post, my name has been anglicized; in Germany it is spelled the same but pronounced \fek’-ə\, which itself is a corruption of the German name Feick. [↩]
So, I should say something serious about your post, but I’ve bashed this guy twice already tonight, and I couldn’t pass this up.
I used to wait tables in a “Mexican” restaurant in a part of the country that didn’t really know from Mexican. I did have a customer once who order fuhjeytuhs, except it sounded a little more like fuh-JI-tis, which, say it out loud to yourself, seriously sounds like something you might need a cream for. Or the body part you might need to put the cream on, for fast relief of feminine itching.
So I kept my cool, didn’t laugh, went home and told my mom about the funny Pennsylvanian. She got red in the face and stammered out “That sounds like … That sounds like … That sounds like … ” before I cut her off by saying “I know what it sounds like!’
Wonderfully said! I wish I’d said that! ;-)
Also, he’s wrong. SO-to-ma-yor isn’t the natural English pronounciation. It might be the natural American pronunciation, but a large part of the difference between those two languages is where the stress falls. The English pronounciation would be so-to-MA-yor.
Of all the possible objections to a Latina candidate one could come up with, I find this one probably the most bizarre possible. Any idiot can pronounce Spanish names, they’re essentially phonetic. Unlike Anglo names which can be pronounced any number of bizarre ways. Sotomayor, easy. Kirkorian, WTF?
Thanks for this post. I was wondering why when I was discussing the nomination with a Republican yesterday, he kept exaggeratedly stumbling over her name (despite being well capable of saying my name, which is equally “foreign”) and over-emphasizing the “or” at the end.
Along the lines of what Froth said, I wonder why Krikorian and his ilk are so troubled by the “Pockiston” pronunciation. That’s how British people pronounce the sounds in “Pakistan,” and since they’re the ones who diced up South Asia and transcribed the languages into Roman characters, they’re going to have used the letters that signify the correct sounds in British English. If Krikorian wants to rewrite what have become relatively standard Arabic, Urdu, Hindi and other transliterations from the former Empire, so that they’re easier for Americans to understand, he’s welcome to try to popularize “Pockiston” as the spelling for the “Land of the Pure” to the west of India.
What with this pronunciation nonsense* and Krikorian’s apparent belief that Puerto Ricans are foreigners to the U.S., can we stop pretending that he and his think tank, the Center for Immigration Studies, are opposed only to illegal immigration?
It’s guys like this who fueled my (probably intemperate and excessive) annoyance with Gov. Jindal’s using “Bobby” instead of his legal name — I feel that that sort of assimilation is giving in to the Krikorian crowd. It’s like begging, “Hey, I promise I’ll be one of those good immigrants who isn’t all uppity demanding that you even try to prounounce my ever-so-complicated-two-syllable first name.”
I know very few people who get upset or offended by mispronunciations of their names, so it seems like all Krikorian is trying to avoid is having anyone correct him. God forbid that he be going off on a rant about Sotomayor and someone say, “Excuse me, but I think it’s pronounced SotomayOR.” Can’t have people going around telling NRO guys they’re wrong about something.
* I did love Gawker on this:
“We feel the same way about Rush Limbogg and the states of Arkansas, Illinois, and Connecticut.” And Krikorian never makes clear how his own Armenian name is supposed to be pronounced: Is Cry-CORE-e-ann OK? Because that’s what feels natural to me.
Oh, and he’s just wrong as a matter of linguistic fact in his claim that we don’t have gendered nouns in English and therefore Latino/a is a horrid imposition. English has a ton of words derived from the Romance languages, so we end up with gendered nouns like “actor/actress” or “dominator/dominatrix.”
The irony is that the way Sonia Sotomayor pronounces her name is already Anglicized. In standard spoken Puerto-Rican-of-the-south-Bronx, the “y” in her name sounds like something between a “ch” and a “zh”. She and her family are already assimilating to the surrounding culture’s sounds by substituting an American “y” sound instead. Sort of the same way Krikorian’s family, as he points out, have accepted turning their three-syllable name into a four-syllable one. This is all just a dog-whistle.
For the record, for all of you who are wondering, Krikorian’s name is pronounced exactly the way it’s written. In Spanish, I mean.
Is that a common joke in English? I remember I once mispronounced the word retina in English, and my American friend made basically the same joke.
To be fair, I don’t think that was brought up as an actual objection to a Latina candidate. It was more of an objection to having to deal with Latino culture in general.
I think you’re quite right that Krikorian’s objection to Latino/a is at odds with the existence of such word pairs in English. However, he’s right that there’s no grammatical gender in English.
To put it technically: the closest English comes to having grammatical gender is that it has gendered pronouns that agree with their antecedents in broadly semantic grounds. The examples you cite are what linguists would refer to as “lexical,” and not what as “grammatical”: they’re simply idiosyncratic word pairs that differ in meaning by whether they denote a male or a female. This is not the case in Spanish; all nouns in Spanish are assigned to one of the two genders, all modifiers of the noun must agree with it on gender, and the gender of a noun in Spanish correlates much more closely with its word ending than with its meaning.
sacundim,
I agree that English doesn’t have grammatical gender, but if we look at the word pair “Latino/Latina,” which is what Krikorian found objectionable, it seems to me an instance of the gender of a noun correlating with meaning. Just as actor/actress denotes male/female who acts, or dominator/dominatrix male/female who is into domination, Latino/Latina denotes male/female of Latin American descent.
nm,
I was wondering about that. I don’t know from Puerto Rico, but I learned Spanish in Costa Rica, and I pronounce “yo” like “jo,” etc.
I’m a teacher who’s required to take roll in some of my classes, and so I find myself saying the names of students from all over the world (we’re quite a diverse campus.) While I don’t think Kirkorian is correct in this specific instance, I do think there’s a difference between pronunciation and accent, and that it’s not inappropriate to strive to pronounce a name correctly, but to use one’s own accent.
In the case of “Sotomayor,” I can easily stress whichever syllable I’m instructed to, as can pretty much any native speaker of English, Spanish, or similarly derived languages.
But people in different regions of the world pronounce their names with a particular “character,” and it can be excessive to expect all others to try to take on that character, as well. By way of comparison, imagine if I had three students, each named “Bobby Smith:” one from California, one from rural Mississippi, and one from the outskirts of London. While each name might technically have the same pronunciation, if I tried to recreate the accent of each student, it would likely sound like I was making fun of them.
Phil,
Absolutely — I wouldn’t want people to try to say my name with what they thought was an Indian accent, as I don’t find Apu-at-the-Quik-E-Mart imitations uniformly hilarious. But so far as I know, neither Sotomayor nor Obama nor anyone else expects people to do that. I met her very briefly once at a big lunch a couple years ago (also attended by Justice Alito and his wife, who is a sweetheart), and I don’t recall her trying to get people to say her name in a Spanish accent.
My fiancee can’t help giggling like a fifth grader whenever the cut of meat called “ball tip” is mentioned.
Anything that could vaguely possibly be construed as referring to a naughty bit is hilarious in English.
—Myca
Re: Phil’s comment about pronunciation v. accent
I am a native English speaker with a lot of exposure to Spanish as a kid, so my “accent” is pretty good when I speak Spanish. And I would probably say “Sotomayor” differently if I was having a conversation with someone in Spanish v. if I was doing so in English. It’s subtle, but the o’s and the t have a slightly different sound in Spanish than in English too. But I wouldn’t break up an English conversation with a Spanish-accented “Sotomayor.” I’d put the emphasis in the right place, but I’d pronounce it with my usual English accent.
Although it does really blend together, because I wouldn’t say “Sah-to-ma-yor” knowing that she pronounces it “Soh-to-ma-yor.”
I don’t know about American English, but in British English there’s a pretty common accentuatution on the final syllable of words that come from French…I don’t recall noticing that much of a difference for american and english pronounciations on those though :).
And I totally agree with Emily here, I say English words/names the French way while speaking French otherwise people wonder what the hell i’m going on about^^
But that’s not the point, really, is it?Just some guy is asserting that her name should be said the way a bunch of white dudes want to say, not the way she says it. Nice.
@ lonespark and Phil (and Emily):
Yeah, Puerto Rican immigrants (and their children) in the Bronx do pronounce “y” more like English “j/ch”. And that is, I suppose, perceived as a question of accent, since no one I know would be surprised if an Anglophone left it as English “y” in saying a Spanish word or name in the course of a conversation in English. But that’s the sort of assimilation I mean; in one more generation the Anglophone pronunciation becomes the standard even for folks whose names are changed that way. Even when they know how their grandparents used to say it.
So my husband and children have a French last name that is spelled differently in English than it is pronounced (and his family had made the pronunciation closer to American English than the French pronounciation) Are they bad patriots for not changing the spelling (which includes a lower case letter to begin the name)? Or are people being rude when they don’t bother trying to spell or pronounce it correctly? This makes me tired. What a stupid argument.
PG@10 says:
No, this is not “an instance of the gender of a noun correlating with meaning”. Repeat after yourself: “English doesn’t have grammatical gender”. “Actor” and “actress” are not one noun with two forms, but two nouns whose main difference in meaning is the sex (not gender*) of the thing they refer to. It’s just like “brother” and “sister,” or “sir” and “ma’am”, except that “actor” and “actress” are similar because they’re related words.
*It’s common now to use “gender” to mean “sex” (as in male or female), as if “sex” were a dirty word. But when talking about language you have to keep the distinction.
Dr. Whom,
So the Screen Actors’ Guild doesn’t accept actresses? There’s no such thing as a “female actor”?
Latino/Latina operates similarly.
Also, when I (and many other grown-ups) use “gender” instead of “sex,” it’s not because “sex” is a dirty word, but because “sex” refers to biology whereas “gender” is a social category. I have no idea whether a given actress actually has a vagina under her costume; the point is that she is socially perceived as female, and thus has the female gender and female terms such as “actress” are applied to her.
PG: Well, OK. Unlike “sir” and “brother”, “actor” can refer to a person-who-acts of either sex, as well as meaning specifically a male person-who-acts, and similarly for “Latino/a”. Although that person-who-acts in your example, who is perceived as and presents herself as female, may insist on being called an “actress” rather than an “actor”. And yes, the difference between social identity as male/female (called “gender”) and biological status as male/female (called “sex”) is very important, which may very well influence that actress’s verbal preference.
But social “gender”, which applies to persons, is distinct from grammatical “gender”, which applies to words. When you speak of “the gender of a noun” you’re talking about grammatical gender. The choice word between “actor” and “actress”, “Latino” and “Latina”, does not depend on the (nonexistent) grammatical gender of the word, but on the social gender of the person being referred to.
Dr. Whom,
I’m not clear on what point you’re disputing with me. I said “English doesn’t have grammatical gender,” but that it does have words where the gendered suffix of a noun correlates with the gendered meaning of the noun. Latina (derived from Spanish) is a female-gendered noun to correlate with its American-language meaning of “woman of Latino descent.” Executrix (derived from Latin) is a female-gendered noun to correlate with its American-language meaning of “woman who executes, e.g. a will.” I don’t mean by the “gendered suffix of the noun” that it must be preceded by the appropriately-gendered article, because of course we don’t have gendered articles in English, but that it has a particular suffix — a, ess, enne, ette, trix — that indicates the gender of the person in question.
PG: I’m used to using “gender” as a technical term for a type of grammatical classification of words, which controls grammatical agreement between whatever classes in the language use it. In the Romance languages a noun’s gender controls gender of articles (le père, la mère), other determiners and adjectives (mon vieux père, ma vieille mère), and some other types of word. Le professeur, où est-elle? (“Where is the (woman) professor?”, lit. “The professor, where is she?”) has a masculine article because the noun is masculine (grammatical gender), but a feminine pronoun because the noun’s referent is female (social gender).
English has none of these forms of agreement: only pronouns systematically reflect any kind of gender, and there the choice there is determined purely by the social gender of the referent (the doctor/professor/actor said he/she couldn’t see me till next week). So “gender of a noun” is misleading.
And even though we do have English “words where the gendered suffix of a noun correlates with the gendered meaning of the noun”, we can’t attach those “suffixes” freely or even within defined classes of words. They’re parts of the words as we’ve borrowed them from languages where they are productive. We don’t have “doctor” male-or-general vs. *”doctrix” female, although in Latin they mean “teacher”, with those social genders. (“*” means nonexistent form.)
Thanks for the discussion.
UPDATE: The Republican National Committee has issued talking points partially repudiating Kirkorian’s perspective. In an effort to avoid appearing petty, they encourage fellow Republicans to refer to the Supreme Court nominee as \sō-tō-mī-Democratic-Socialist -yor’\.
For what it’s worth, I acknowledge that English differs from Romance languages in that English does not assign a gender to each noun as a matter of grammar. Whether it does so as a matter of syntax is open to debate. In 1992 Deborah Cameron published a study in which participants were presented with pairs of related English words and asked to assign one of each pair to the category “masculine” and one to “feminine.”
That’s semantics, not syntax.
Note, btw, that syntax is a part of grammar. (You: “I acknowledge that … English does not assign a gender to each noun as a matter of grammar. Whether it does so as a matter of syntax is open to debate.”)
Really, if you don’t know the difference between syntax and semantics, you shouldn’t be using either word.
Whoops, that’s right.
Salt is feminine? What?!?!?! Ok, that stuff makes no sense at all. If I undertand what they mean, I would think “meat and potatoes” would be masculine and “salad” would be feminine, etc. So maybe I don’t understand at all what they mean.
lonespark,
I think it has less to do with the meaning of the words and more to do with how they sound. Ford is a boy’s name; there is a nice bit in one of the Ramona Quimby books where she names one of her dolls Chevrolet because she thinks the name is pretty for a girl. However, relating back to the Romance-language aspect of English, note that when one word in the pairing ended with a vowel sound (Chevrolet, vanilla) it was assigned as feminine.
Also, the word salt was contrasted with pepper. As between those two, which would you categorize as masculine and which as feminine? Pepper seems more “aggressive” in flavor, and it’s color (black) is deemed less pure — qualities associated more with men than women. Salt is less known as an aggressive flavor, and its color (white) is associated with purity — qualities associated more with women than with men.
Or so I surmise. I don’t recall that the study participants had to explain their reasoning.
That’s interesting. I once was in a restaurant in Mexico and the restrooms had, respectively, a sun and a moon on the doors. I used the “moon” because it’s “la luna” vs. “el sol,” with sun being masculine and moon feminine. When I got back to the table, I mentioned this to my friend, who didn’t speak Spanish, and she said she would have used the one with the sun.
So I’m not sure what accounts for that sense of words. I don’t think it’s just how they sound. If I were to do that test, I think my results would be tainted by speaking Spanish. I’d probably be importing genders.
To be sure, the answer to these questions is (almost?) entirely culturally derived. Perhaps the idea that a knife is male would transcend cultures; perhaps not.
For what it’s worth, I went to a hunting-lodge-themed restaurant which adorned the bathroom doors with pictures of dogs. You were supposed to be able to distinguish the “pointer” from the “setter” and draw the correct conclusion. Culture at its finest.
Oh, I’m sure. But it’s interesting to wonder about the cultural derivations and why two different cultures would assign different genders to particular nouns. Even in the languages that assign actual gender to words, there’s a lot of randomness in it and words that go against stereotypes or cultural tropes in their assigned gender. In Spanish, often two words that are essentially synonyms will have different genders. I’m sure people have studied this and theorized about it extensively, and I’m just not familiar with their work. But I find it fascinating.
I actually posted about one of those studies that claimed people distinguish male things from female things. I don’t think there’s anything to it.
Anyway, Myca:
I’m fairly sure that transcends language.