I have a weird last name. Spelled, Fecke, it\u2019s pronounced \\fek\u2019-\u0113\\, with a long e at the end. ((Ironically, given the topic of this post, my name has been anglicized; in Germany it is spelled the same but pronounced \\fek\u2019-\u0259\\, which itself is a corruption of the German name Feick.)) But given that it\u2019s unusual, I\u2019m not put off by any of the odd variants people will use when they first meet me, even if it\u2019s my favorite weird one, \\f\u0113k\\.<\/p>\n
But while I\u2019m very tolerant of mispronunciations of my name on first meetings, I don\u2019t know what I would think if I corrected the pronunciation and was told, in all seriousness, \u201cWell, \\fek\u2019-\u0113\\ isn\u2019t a standard English pronunciation in my book. I\u2019m going to stick with \\fek\\.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Enter Mark Kirkorian, who is a person we need not deal with ever again. He wondered yesterday whether Sonia Sotomayor\u2019s last name wasn\u2019t, well, too ethnic<\/em> for us to pronounce correctly<\/a>:<\/p>\n 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 \u201cPockiston\u201d tradition, he also rolled his r\u2019s in Puerto Rico.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Horrors! Barack Obama pronounced Sonia Sotomayor\u2019s name correctly<\/em>! What\u2019s next, he goes to a Mexican restaurant and doesn\u2019t order \u201cGwack-uh-mohl\u201d on his \u201cFuhjeytuhs?\u201d Why can\u2019t he pronounce it like the good old English name Niedermeyer<\/em>, which means \u201cName which is German?\u201d<\/p>\n Not content with asking whether we shouldn\u2019t mispronounce Sonia Sotomayor\u2019s name deliberately, Kirkorian decided to take it to the next level<\/a>:<\/p>\n Deferring to people\u2019s 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\u2019s simple preference for a monophthong over a diphthong, and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn\u2019t be giving in to.<\/p>\n [\u2026]<\/p>\n This may seem like carping, but it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there\u2019s a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Really? Because that\u2019s the most idiotic thing I\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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\u2019s come across over the years, and that\u2019s the language\u2019s great strength.<\/p>\n So Judge Sotomayor pronounces her name \\s\u014d-t\u014d-m\u012b-yor\u2019\\? So what? It\u2019s unusual in English to stress the final syllable of a polysyllabic word, but it isn\u2019t unheard of. There\u2019s not a rule in English that wasn\u2019t made to be broken. That\u2019s one of the grand things about the language \u2014 that it simply adapts as new loan words and loan names are brought in. Oh, sure, there\u2019s some Anglicization going on \u2014 I\u2019m not going to attempt to roll the r<\/em> on Sotomayor<\/em>, because as a native American English speaker, I really can\u2019t \u2014 but I can at least approximate the pronunciation, and get the stress on the right syllable. After all, it\u2019s only neighborly to try to pronounce a name the way it\u2019s pronounced. Real Americans are supposed to be neighborly \u2014 something Kirkorian evidently doesn\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n (Via Steve Benen<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have a weird last name. Spelled, Fecke, it\u2019s pronounced \\fek\u2019-\u0113\\, with a long e at the end. ((Ironically, given the topic of this post, my name has been anglicized; in Germany it is spelled the same but pronounced \\fek\u2019-\u0259\\, … Continue reading