A lot of "good ole boys" these days don't think we should accommodate speakers of other languages, and a lot of other people want to accommodate everyone, but I personally am on the fence. On one hand, I can see the benefit of telling things to people in their own language, but on the other hand, I see the monetary cost associated with doing so. The white house has to have staff to write and proof the Spanish version whereas before they only had an English staff. But the cost to society without that is that a large part of the population don't get access to the information that might help to inform them.
Tough call...the jury's still out on this one.
*That's whitehouse.gov, not .com. Whitehouse.com used to be a porn site, but it looks like that's gone away and now it is just one of those "helps you search" sites that I hate.
5 comments:
Darrell,
Check out my blog about this language thing. Its the next to last post.
C. Oxford
I honestly think you are missing the point by a wide margin. Unless you are a native American, all of our families came here speaking a foreign language. I think perhaps we have to be more tolerant. If we need to translate to spanish, or some would like to sing our national anthem in spanish, who does it hurt? At least the want to honor America and sing the song. There are really not two sides to this story. Unless you consider bigotry and having no tolerance is a legit side.
I am sure Hitler thought there was more than one side to his story as well.
Hitler, huh? Sounds like someone doesn't want to discuss the subject. No one wants to be Hitler, so I guess we'd better drop it --- reminiscent of McCarthy's method of discouraging debate.
Singing in Spanish doesn't hurt anyone. It's great. Private businesses using Spanish is also fine as long as it is an option guided by the interests of capitalism and not forced on anyone (no business should be forced to offer English either). But bilingual education vs. language assimilation in public schools has been studied and proven to increase illiteracy, dropout rates, and cost of education in a world where teachers and schools already are undervalued and underpaid. That should address partly who is hurt.
I respect other cultures, but we should encourage English. We could encourage some Native American language as a national language in honor of those persons who were so terribly mistreated and subjected to government-sanctioned genocide, but that wouldn't be efficient.
Hitler hated Jews. He didn't simply think the country would run better if people all spoke German as well as their home languages. DarrellH would never condone hatred of Hispanic Americans even if he did settle on the side of English for efficiency, which he has not.
The fence is a great place to be. A person can think from that vantage point.
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