Mark Krikorian of the right-wing Center for Immigration Studies blogs on the Corner today about his outrage over people “[d]eferring” to Sotomayor over the “unnatural pronunciation” of her own name:
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. […]
[O]ne 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.
What’s next? Should people with “unnatural” names “adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with”?