Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog wrote a nice post addressing the absurdness of allegations/fears of racial bias surrounding Sonia Sotomayor. It's a good post, but I'm not going to really go into it here. But Goldstein linked to a post by Mark Krikorian for National Review Online about foreign pronunciation that I'd like to discuss, and not just to criticize further. (Though Krikorian seems to care a bit too much.)

It's a topic that's been kicking around in my head for a while from my experiences in foreign language classes. If you took a foreign language class, you might have run into this too -- the first encounter is when you're choosing a name to use in the class. For instance, my name in Spanish would be Adán. (Though I actually ended up choosing a different name.) I'm not sure what is usually done for ESL classes, but the idea of choosing an "English name" seems kind of absurd to me. Making an effort to preserve the original pronunciations of names seems like the norm in English to me. (Even spelling is generally preserved, if the alphabet is close enough.) I don't have enough exposure to current foreign language use to be sure, but it does seem that there is generally some preservation of proper nouns. (I think this preservation, in English and in other languages, may be relatively recent; we retain old imports such as Moscow (instead of Moskva) and Leo Tolstoy (instead of Lev).)

But more interesting, I think, is English's somewhat abundant and seemingly pedantic use of loanwords. Again, we keep the pronunciation (well, sort of) and often the spelling. Based on my limited experience, other languages seem far more likely to change one or both (Spanish hamburguesa, French hamburger). And indeed, I think I remember hearing that certain languages were resistant to using foreign words at all, preferring substitutes in their own language. The differences in attitude regarding loanwords make me wonder about their underlying causes. I certainly think part of it is that English is largely on the descriptivist end of the scale (to the dismay of many pedants), so the words have an easier time getting in. In addition, English is already cobbled together from so many linguistic pieces -- and consequently, the spelling is far from phonetic -- that foreign words don't seem absolutely out of place. Even though I'm not a huge fan of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it's enough to make me wonder if our culture's lean toward linguistic descriptivism and openness to loanwords is somehow influenced by the nature of the language itself. (Would that be meta-linguistic relativism?)

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Incidentally, NRO seems to be Base64 encoding the ID for their posts, even though the unencoded ID is in hex. I'm not really sure why you'd do that, since the hex is shorter and doesn't need any URL escaping.