[Sca-cooks] OT OOP "Official Language" was Seville orange substitutions

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

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