[Sca-cooks] OT OOP "Official Language" was Seville orange substitutions
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius.magister at verizon.net
Fri Jul 16 13:39:07 PDT 2004
Also sprach Huette von Ahrens:
>While I agree with you on a federal level, I
>don't agree with you on a local level. Here
>in California, English is the predominent
>language. In years past, Spanish was the second
>language. But in the past 10 years or more, that
>has been changing rapidly to Chinese, especially
>where I live. Because of this and because of the
>exclusive nature of immigrant Chinese, many towns
>with large Chinese populations have had to write
>laws stating that English is the official
>language. Why? Take Monterey Park for example.
>60% of their citizens are of Chinese origin. 95%
>of their stores prior to this new law had signs
>written only in Chinese. This means that only
>Chinese readers knew what these stores were
>selling. Which I find to be discriminatory, but
>that isn't why the laws were written. When
>emergencies happened and 911 was called to a
>store, the firemen and the police had difficulty
>finding the location, as even the store addresses
>were written in Chinese on the building. Monterey
>Park passed this law and also one requiring that
>all signs had to be at least partially in English
>so that emergency personel could find the
>locations and hopefully save lives.
This is interesting because, if you pick up, say, a Chinese or
Chinese-American newspaper, while most of the text may be Chinese
ideographs, numbers are almost invariably in Arabic numerals, and I
assume street signs are in the Roman alphabet. So while I can see
some difficulty in theory, in practice, I suspect it's not all that
difficult. I'd be extremely surprised if there were really nothing at
all on their signs comprehensible to the average English-reader.
I mean, it _may_ be as much of a problem as has been reported, but
then, it could also be an excuse for "English-as-official-language"
arguments.
I guess it's also conceivable that more recent immigrants have less
of a clue than those who've been here a while, or for more than a
generation...
Adamantius
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