Official Languages

Our furniture and other items of personalty have arrived from America.  The past few days have been spent unpacking and reorganizing; nothing particularly remarkable as far as this type of thing goes.  Last night my wife actually cooked a meal in our kitchen and served it on our dining room table, a welcome improvement from snarfing food on the run, or even eating at restaurants all the time.

The following administrative law decision from the Illinois Department of Revenue has come to my attention, especially its curious footnote: 

" 5 ILCS 460/20 states that the “official language” of the State of Illinois is English. 35 ILCS 120/7 requires that all books and records required to be kept by the Retailers Occupation Tax Act “shall be kept in the English language.” 86 Ill. Adm. Code 130.801(e) requires that books and records necessary for a determination of correct tax liability “must be kept in the English language.” In light of these provisions, it would be absurd for me to conclude that the department must issue its own documents and forms in a language other than English."

This is interesting and ironic to me because I now find myself in a jurisdiction whose official language is other than English, and my mastery of the Hebrew language leaves much to be desired.  While many of the official forms in Israel do have their English versions, official or (usually) otherwise, there still are many transactions where I must seek assistance beyond Google Translate in order to sufficiently comprehend the documents at hand.  I have had occasion (most notably but not solely the lease to our apartment) to engage a young American man, the son of a former client, whose linguistic skills and amenability to use them to supplement his income have worked to our mutual advantage.

Additionally, the Illinois provision is most out of character with what is thought of by most (including the liberals themselves) as the liberal stance -- One would think that it would be most politically incorrect in Illinois, the home state of Barack Hussein Obama (Hawaii and Kenya notwithstanding).

English Heard on the Street

I was walking on the street in a town next to mine.  This particular neighborhood (which, like much of Israel, consists of edifices with businesses and offices on the first story, and residential apartments at various levels above) does not have quite the concentration of Anglos as does the vicinity of my apartment (which itself is certainly is not the most Anglo-saturated neighborhood).  But some words of English were to be heard there this afternoon.

An American woman was doing her shopping with three young children in tow, two of whom were young enough to fit into a two-seat stroller.  The third one, about 4 years old, had apparently had his 4-year-old's patience drained, and was acting out.  Mom was likewise stretched to her limits.

The 4-year-old kid wanted a toy that was on display in a store window.  And he was very vocal and obnoxious about his desire.

So vocal and obnoxious that it caused a current overload in Momma's circuits, and Momma blew a fuse:  "I said 'no' and I mean 'no'!  You are a greedy, conniving, manipulative brat and if you ask me once more I will smack your butt!  I don't want to hear anything more from you until we get home!"

I was walking in the opposite direction about 2 meters away.  I looked at the woman and said, very audibly, "How good it is to hear some English spoken for a change!"

Fortunately, some of the Israelis in the immediate vicinity understood English, and a few started to laugh.  The woman's face broke out into a smile amidst the laughter.  I continued on along to my appointment.

English and Blindness

            When it comes to something like home ownership, it is quite appropriate to require those who would disentitle a home purchaser to jump through all of the hoops, grab all of the rings, and steer the go-kart through all of the hairpin turns to show their clear entitlement to a foreclosure judgment before evicting the homeowner.  Once this is accomplished, however, the lenders are entitled to their remedies for defaulted loans.

            Like so many on Long Island and elsewhere, Maria Navarro found herself unable to pay the mortgage loan on her home, and, notwithstanding the recent tweaks to the statutes and the court rules to level the playing field between homeowner and mortgage holder, Maria has now gotten a judgment of foreclosure slapped upon her.

            Seems that Maria failed to answer the complaint filed in the court by Onewest Bank, the holder of the mortgage on her home.  She belatedly obtained counsel (smart money says assigned counsel, i.e., taxpayers' treat), who asserted that Maria should be given leave to file a late answer, which would interpose various defenses, including the argument that her default in answering the complaint was on account of her inability to read or write English when she .

            Judge Whelan wasn't eating any of that up.  Hizzoner reasoned that just as blind individuals are obligated to take reasonable efforts to obtain competent help in ascertaining the meaning of legal document that affect them, so, too, are those who are illiterate in English.

            [Onewest Bank v. Navarro, 2013 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 5656, 2013 NY Slip Op 52053(U)].

            One must wonder how Maria, with her handicapping inability to understand English, was able to find sufficient gainful employment to amass enough assets to be able to afford a home in the first place.

            Surely, the purveyor of the mortgage would have done a sufficient background check on Maria to ascertain and verify her earning capacity, and she never, ever would have been given a mortgage loan unless she had the demonstrated skills and acumen to obtain and maintain gainful employment.  And surely, her illiteracy in English would have prevented her from completing the loan application documents (Plural!  Very plural!).

            Mortgage lenders are very meticulous in making loans, so I really, really, cannot understand how she got the loan in the first place.

            [Oh, wait!  This blog posting needs a rework!   Never Mind!!!]

Spelling some Troubling Implications

It is the end of the semester, the Final Exams have been administered, and now, I have a little more than a week to get the final grades submitted to the University Registrar.  I will be grading exams and term papers for the next few days.

While incorrectly spelling the name of the professor does not constitute an automatic failure, or even an automatic grade reduction in the courses I teach (yet), neither am I favorably impressed by students who misspell my name.

Even more perplexing are those students who spell their own names incorrectly.

My grandparents emigrated to America from the former Soviet Union, where the Cyrillic alphabet is used instead of the Roman alphabet; my grandparents, whose primary language was Yiddish, were conversant in the Hebrew alphabet no less than in the Cyrillic.  Accordingly, what with the transliterations from the Cyrillic and Hebrew alphabets to Roman alphabet, there are variants in how my surname is spelled in America by various branches of the family (and in Israel, the transition from Cyrillic to Hebrew has yielded at least two different Hebrew versions).  So yes, approximately 90 or 100 years ago there were some confusions by some members of my extended family as to how their names are spelled (which is just as well, because the bad branch of the family, who spelled it differently from mine in America, are not so easily conflated with the rest of us).

Given my family's experience, I can sort of understand a student misspelling his or her name if they come from a place where the Roman alphabet is not the standard.  I have a student from China who has been in America for less than a year; she has spelled her name a number of different ways (though she did learn English quite well before she came here).  But at least she has something resembling a plausibly good reason.

Not so for the student whose family has been here for over 100 years, and who has used at least three spelling variants of his own surname (which is not all that uncommon).

I am convinced that the texting culture has caused a deterioration in the integrity of the English language.  I don't know what to read into it, but my gut hunch is that it is more likely to do harm than good.  If people are spelling their own names incorrectly, then we have probably gotten ourselves beyond Stage One of whatever long slide down the slippery slope we have embarked upon.

Talking about the Legacy

I really shouldn't be writing this post now because I have so much to do, but I have just had a very frustrating day (the details of which shall not now burden the reader) and I need to take a break from it all.

One of the e-mails in the In Box was a Call For Papers on teaching students whose primary language is not English.

I frequently get Calls for Papers. Most of them are of no interest to me, but I have been known to submit some, and have made a few presentations at conferences (including one within the past six months).

I have no professional interest in this latest Call of Papers. What I did notice, however, was the use of the term "legacy speakers" to refer to people in America whose language preference is not English.

I remember my grandparents and parents conversing in Yiddish (which my own generation eventually picked up) and other languages from the old countries when they really, really, did not want the younger generation to understand the conversation. But even though my grandparents were born over there and English was their second (or third) language, they each had an excellent command of English (albeit with a heavy accent).

And while only one of my grandparents managed to graduate high school, and none of them attended college (though my grandfather did pass the entrance exam to an Ivy League school), all four of them could read and understand the fine English literature, the daily newspapers, and even a few specialized technical writings.

But in my parents' and grandparents' day, conversancy in one's ancestral language was never an excuse for a resident of the United States to not be conversant and literate in English. Today, there are fewer incentives for people in America whose first language is not English (present in the country legally or otherwise) to learn English.

I have no objection to people being conversant and literate in the languages of their parents and grandparents. Millions of Americans of diverse backgrounds are. There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one's ethnic and linguistic heritage.

But I am very conspiracy-minded, and somehow, I suspect that the term "legacy speaker" is part of some grand plot to excuse people in America from learning English, and leaving America all the more vulnerable to a takeover by various and sundry hostile elements.

Press 1 for English, Press 2 for Violence

My wife practices at a large area hospital. The concept of giving aid to the poor is a distinct part of the Judeo-Christian culture, and accordingly, a percentage of her department's patients are the so-called "charity cases." As much as we may complain, this aspect of Western culture is one thing that has made us so great.

I daresay that I myself am a beneficiary of this, because my great-grandmother, widowed with three young daughters, was the recipient of aid from various sources when she came to America. But her descendants have by and large succeeded, and collectively, even adjusting to constant dollars, have voluntarily donated to charity ("tzedaka" in Hebrew) many multiples of the amounts our matriarch received (even when you don't count the multi-millionaire cousin of mine who is active on the board of a large charity). Just today, for example, I myself wrote and mailed out checks to two institutions that care for orphans. I expect to cut a few more checks in the next few weeks, what with the Rosh HaShanah holiday coming up.

But like everything else, charity often gets abused. Within the past week, an administrator in my wife's department was venting to my wife about a patient (not my wife's) who is a "charity case," understands close to zero English, does not work, and is probably an illegal alien, but who took up so much of the administrator's time in getting the woman's medical treatment attended to. What is this woman contributing to our society? My grandparents at least mastered the English language, and didn't need translators to transact normal routine business like healthcare, grocery shopping or banking.

My wife, along with all her other activities, is now taking some post-professional education courses. The particular course she now is taking is about the role of culture in health care. In connection with this, she came out with a somewhat profound observation this evening (or, rather, she had the gumption to post it online for her classmates and instructor to see). It goes something like this:

Being that language is a part of the respective cultures, are we not, in America today, witnessing some cultural violence on account of the great obsession to translate everything into Spanish?

The menu, then, is " Press 1 for English, Press 2 for Violence."