I state for the record that I am not one of those fanatical “English-only” nuts. I do believe that immigrants who come to the US need to learn and begin using English as quickly as possible, for the sake of their own advancement. I also believe that we Americans tend to be rather a sloppy bunch when it comes to learning other languages, to our continuing detriment…
That said, something about this editorial just annoys the shit out of me. The idea that state governments in what is — by custom, if not by law — an English-speaking nation should be required to accommodate the alphabets of other languages in government-issued documents bothers me. Just as I would not expect a speeding ticket issued in Barcelona to be worded in English, I wouldn’t expect a driver’s license issued in the US to use a non-English alphabet…
“Those little marks aren’t decorations. They’re part of the Spanish language,” he states. I agree. But we speak English here. Like it or not, that’s the way it is. If we start adding accent and stress marks, should we then start producing driver’s licenses which use Cyrillic or Hebrew characters? Maybe Japanese too? Software compatibility issues aside, it’s just plain ludicrous…
“But it’s her name,” he whines, as if one accent mark were the only measure of the poor child’s identity. Reminds me of kids in school who whine that a certain standard of dress “stifles their individuality”, to whom I respond that, if that’s all the individuality you can muster, you don’t have enough of it to be concerned with anyway…
People have been misspelling my Welsh surname all my life. PG&E misspells it every month on my power bill. And the government persists in calling me “James” even though I prefer to use my middle name. It’s been surprisingly easy learning to cope…