NRO’S KRIKORIAN ON PRONUNCIATION OF SOTOMAYOR’S NAME: "IT STICKS IN MY CRAW"
May 27, 2009 12:08 pm ET by Media Matters staff

Media Matters for America

May 27 2009

>From Mark Krikorian’s May 27 post on the National Review Online’s
The Corner:

It Sticks in My Craw [Mark Krikorian]

Most e-mailers were with me on the post on the pronunciation of Judge
Sotomayor’s name (and a couple griped about the whole Latina/Latino
thing – English dropped gender in nouns, what, 1,000 years ago?). 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 – "sipe" instead of "seep.") 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.

For instance, in Armenian, the emphasis is on the second syllable in my
surname, just as in English, but it has three syllables, not four (the
"ian" is one syllable) – but that’s not how you’d say it in English
(the "ian" means the same thing as in English – think Washingtonian or
Jeffersonian). Likewise in Russian, you put the emphasis in my name on
the final syllable and turn the "o" into a schwa, and they’re free to
do so because that’s the way it works in their language. And should we
put Asian surnames first in English just because that’s the way they
do it in Asia? When speaking of people in Asia, okay, but not people of
Asian origin here, where Mao Tse-tung would properly have been changed
to Tse-tung Mao. Likewise with the Mexican practice of including your
mother’s maiden name as your last name, after your father’s surname.

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.