Jose Can You See

Malkin = Odd fish. Of course, as a Filipina, it would be easy to forgive her a few hard feelings against the Spanish… but then: why not also a fair share against U.S. imperialist misadventures?

So if the right wing fantasy comes true and the US is overrun with new immigrants, will they name things “White bread”, or possibly “Pat Boone”?

Oregon isn’t a Spanish word, or name.
Its linguistic origin is as shadowy and vague as that of California, which many people can tell you is named after a mythical land of plenty in Spanish folk mythology – though no one can tell you what the word itself means.
As in Vermont means “Green Mountain”. As in Los Angeles means “The Angels”. As in London means “Lud’s Town”. As in Washington means “Town where things get washed” or whatever, etc.
The etmymological roots of California are lost in the vaporous mists of history. As are Oregon’s.

Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, Illinois, Kansas, etc., etc.

Re: State names
I always thought that the standard algoritm for naming a place in the US, at least in New England, was to call it the name of the last original inhabitant to leave or the first colonist to arrive?

Umm, Tejas?

“Mexico” comes from an old Nahuatl word, and “Teja” is Caddoan. So I suppose you could argue they’re not really Spanish.

Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, maybe Rhode Island.

Approximately 13 states with English or Anglo-Latin names. English seems to have the plurality of state names, since I count 8 that are Spanish or via Spanish to English and seven from various Sioux dialects.

Maybe if a quarter of the lyrics were in English and half in Native American languages, Malkin’d be happy.

What about Michigan? Sounds suspiciously like Michoacán, a state in western Mexico that means, I believe, “place where there are fish” in Tarascan.

Growing up in Idaho we were always told that the name was some sort of stupid bastardaization of a Native American name, in the same sort of way that “Boise” is a stupid bastardization of “Les Bois”. I can’t say for sure if that’s true.

Florida and Montana are unobjectionable Latin, more unobjectionable than, say, Georgia or Pennsylvania. The first is a book by Apuleius; the second, among other things, is a slang expression for “mountain-woman”, with all expected pejorative connotations. Are you sure Spanish derivation is at work?

Florida and Montana are unobjectionable Latin, more unobjectionable than, say, Georgia or Pennsylvania.

Florida might be a word in both Latin and Spanish, but the state’s name comes, I believe, from “Pascua Florida”, which is Spanish.

Not to mention Puerto Riico . . .

Kieren’s post implies a common heritage with the people who named those states and the people represented by the song. Conflating the Spanish song with the Spanish naming of those states is conflating Europeans with native americans. Very clever Kieran.

–jet, that was below your usual standard of incoherence. Bravo!

One is European and named those states, the other just happens to speak Spanish, and had little to nothing to do with the naming of those states.

Unfortunately today’s Anglo-Americans had little to nothing to do with the naming of their states either. They were all named a few years ago.

What any of this has to do with the paranoid racist notion that Spanish-speaking Americans have some “dual loyalty” that makes them less American than Michelle Malkin is terribly unclear to me.

Iron Lungfish,

I don’t know much about the Mexica movement, but it is real. People who live in a certain area, usually get a bit defensive when another people start talking about “taking it back”. Perhaps that makes them racists. But then the Tibetians were probably just “racist” against the Chinese for “taking back” Tibet.

Maybe she’s just envious because there’s not a Tagalog version of the national anthem.

And as a small addition, “los Angeles” is not quite “the angels”. The actual name of the city was “el Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula,” but it was a mouthful even for the original settlers, so it kept getting shortened.

Help Michelle get away from the hispanic defilemenent of her pure Americanism. Send her right to the heart of whitebread America, some place like Ohio. SEE, no Mexicans here in Toledo!

DOH!

Spanish in America goes back a long way

So, this justifies bastardizing our nation’s sacred verse, with obvious intent to provoke?

Whatever your feelings about “The Star-Spangled Banner”, I should think a sociologist would be dismayed by any impulse towards, ahem, linguistic diversity.

I should think a sociologist would be dismayed by any impulse towards, ahem, linguistic diversity.

Could you please expand on this, dipnut?

I’ve heard people sing the Star-Spangled Banner in Spanish, Korean, and Japanese. I assume it’s been sung in many other languages. Never bothered me.

Well, I had to choose between “sacred” and “revered”. “Revered” isn’t strong enough; perhaps “uniquely revered” would get the point across, but it’s clunky. “Sacred”, of course, has religious connotations, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” isn’t associated with religion in any formal sense. But that’s not necessary. The poem, and the song, are sacred to (some) Americans.

That said, this whole Star-Spanglish thing is too pathetic to get really exercised over. It’s also too gross and disrespectful to be worth defending.

Whatever, Dale.

Could you please expand on this, dipnut?

Let Kieran do it. What are the documented disadvantages of multilingual societies?

Or the Finns or the Belgians or the Spaniards or the Canadians (say what one will about the Quebec separatists, Canada doesn’t look like it’s collapsing).

Of course I could give negative examples like Paraguay, but somehow I doubt that their problems are related to their being a legally bilingual country.

When did the Star-Spangled Banner become sacred?

It became the national anthem on March 3, 1931.

Up until World War I, “Hail Columbia” was generally considered to be the (unofficial) national anthem.

Ask the Swiss.

Fair enough. Switzerland has had a multilingual society under stable constitutional government (incorporating elements of the U.S. constitution) since 1848. In the century prior to this were half-a-dozen changes of government, an occupation by the French (which included Napoleon’s armies battling Russians and Austrians on Swiss soil), a couple of civil wars and various revolutions, and the iron-fisted rule of the ancien regime. Before that, was, like, Medeival stuff and Romans and whatnot.

So you see, it can take a while to get comfortable with “others”. Not that I anticipate a civil war over the Mexicans. But there are other problems: economic marginalization of the minority; poverty and crime, etc. Pointing out that Canada has not collapsed is setting the bar rather low.

55: ok, how about a higher bar: in some ways, Canada does a better job of mixing cultures than the USA has managed. Multilingualism there has had some rough spots, true, but on the whole has probably strengthened the country. They are quite interesting countries to compare, really.

The actual name of the city was “el Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula,” but it was a mouthful even for the original settlers, so it kept getting shortened.

Los Angeles of Anaheim is still a bit of a mouthful.

Bush Says Anthem Should Be in English

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 28, 2006

Filed at 12:26 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — The national anthem should be sung in English — not Spanish — President Bush declared Friday.

A Spanish language version of the national anthem was released Friday by a British music producer, Adam Kidron, who said he wanted to honor America’s immigrants.

When the president was asked at a Rose Garden question-and-answer session whether the anthem should be sung in Spanish, he replied: ”I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English. ”

He made his remarks on the matters during a wide-ranging briefing with reporters.

”I think people who want to be citizens of this country ought to learn English,” Bush said.

Notice that I’m not making the obvious little joke…. You know, the one about him learning English.

Pointing out that Canada has not collapsed is setting the bar rather low.

No lower than making a sweeping generalization about multilingual societies.

English is a co-official language in iceland. Don’t see them collpasing. While India, which has some 37 languages spoken there has problems, I don’t think that they should be attributed to the multilingual nature of the society. yes, they had major differences, but those were related to religion.

Other nations, such as Iceland and India, have a shared culture and /or race to keep the nation unified.

Come back in a week, james, and I’ll have stopped laughing.

The idea that India has a shared culture/race is pretty funny. I wonder where you can get that kind of self-confidence in the face of your own ignorance? Is there a pill you can take? I’ll have to check my spam for more information…

I think the poster is arguing for an immediate communist revolution, the abolition of private property, and the sharing of wives and husband in one mass orgy, while leaving the children to the tender mercies of mandatory Satanic cultist day care workers. Or am I reading too much between the lines?

“I don’t know if there is any historical evidence for what the namer of Florida intended the name to mean, but ‘flowery pastures’ sounds at least as likely as ‘flowery Easter’.”

Ponce de Leon landed in and named Florida during thr Easter season . . .

My point was not that the name is necessarily Latin, but that (a) ‘florida pascua’ is just as good Latin as it is Spanish, and (b) naming Florida after its flowery pastures is at least as plausible as naming it after flowery Easter. If it was in fact discovered at Easter and named after the date of discovery (like Easter Island, Christmas Island, Rio de Janeiro, and Natal), then that would settle the question, but I would like to see the evidence. In short, you’re probably right, but I still want to see a link.

As for Montana, that’s highly unlikely to be Spanish. It would need a tilde over the N, it would be pronounced moan-Tahn-yuh instead of mon-Tann-uh, and most important, who would name a huge state with many mountains, none of them much larger than the rest, “Mountain” in the singular? The Latin word Montana means “mountainous”, which is far more appropriate than “mountain”. So it appears that there is at least one American state with a pure Latin name, besides the Latinized Georgia, Carolinae, Virginiae, and Pennsylvania. That doesn’t prove that Florida is Latin, but does show that it could be. Of course, if Ponce discovered Florida at Easter and he or one of his companions recorded their reason for calling it that, that would settle the question.

Dr. Weevil,

Keep flogging that dead horse. Do you know what Montana’s state motto is? It’s oro y plata in Spanish it means gold and silver.

Tilde’s could have easily been dropped. Think about how many times people spell São Paulo, Sao Paulo.

P.S. It’s called Google.

Thanks for so effectively shooting yourself in the foot, rp. Your poor aim has left my horse quite lively. If you had Googled yourself instead of leaving the job to me, you would have found numerous respectable sites alleging that the name Montana was “chosen from Latin dictionary by J. M. Ashley. It is a Latinized Spanish word meaning ‘mountainous’.”

The second sentence is inaccurate: the word is perfectly good Latin, not Latinized Spanish. (A Renaissance Latin scholar was known to his friends as Ramirez, to foreigners writing in Latin as Ramiresius: that’s what Latinized Spanish looks like.) But the first sentence is clear enough. I would need a link or bibliographical reference to some more detailed account to be absolutely sure, but the circumstantial details about J. M. Ashley and his dictionary strongly suggest that Montana is in fact a Latin name.

By the way, the Portuguese tilde has quite a different meaning from the Spanish, nasalization rather than palatalization. Are Spanish tildes dropped? Perhaps sometimes, but certainly not always: English adds a Y to ‘canyon’ to make up for the missing tilde on the second N. One might have expected something similar in ‘Montanya’, if it were derived from Spanish.

So Spanish-speaking people had a large part to do with building America. And English-speaking people had a large part to do with building Argentina. And German-speaking people in Chile. So what?

This means that the peoples you listed are an integral part of their respective countries’ history.

We are talking national anthems and they are not historical documents but means to form and sustain a national identity.

Yeah, and citizens of Spanish ancestry have as much right to determine what form that national
identity should take as do citizens of English ancestry.

Dr. Weevil,

No mention of the oro y plata in the motto. That’s pure Spanish. It’s pure Spanish (silver is argentum in Latin). Regardless of the use of the tilde (I’m a fluent Portuguese speaker and pretty good Spanish speaker, btw) it’s certainly possible that it could have been dropped.

As for this:

Thanks for so effectively shooting yourself in the foot, rp. Your poor aim has left my horse quite lively. If you had Googled yourself instead of leaving the job to me, you would have found numerous respectable sites alleging that the name Montana was “chosen from Latin dictionary by J. M. Ashley. It is a Latinized Spanish word meaning ‘mountainous’.”

Not even the simple courteousy of a link?

Your refusal to acknowledge Florida as being Spanish may be even more risible. Any kid growing up there knows that it was named by Ponce de Leon for Pascua Florida.

David Sucher: why “secondary”? Are citizens of Spanish ancestry also “secondary” to other citizens? “Secondary” according to whom, or what?

Dr. Weevil,

I searched through a lot of Latin dictionaries and found most translations of mountainous as being iugosos. Moreover, adjectives seem to end in ous or us. Accordingly, I don’t see how you get montana being mountainous in Latin. You dismissed the latinized Spanish part of the explanation as well.

Color me unimpressed and unconvinced.

If people don’t want to live under American law and customs, they are free not to come here.

do you have a link to the list of 100%-USCA-certified customs we all need to follow ?

If randy paul is “unimpressed and unconvinced”, that is because he is a common troll who refuses to admit it when he is refuted but keeps on offering irrelevant arguments faster than I can shoot them down. I’ll try one more time, mostly for others he may have led astray:

Whatever he may have found in “a lot of Latin dictionaries”, the adjective iugosus occurs only twice in all of classical Latin, both times in Ovid (Amores 1.1.9 and Heroides 4.85, if you want to check). Montanus is the standard adjective for ‘mountainous’, and is attested long before and after Ovid’s time in dozens of authors. The feminine singular nominative (subject form) of montanus is montana.

Why should it be feminine in the name of the state Montana? Probably for the same reason Taiwan was once called Formosa, not Formoso, and some people call the Falkland Islands the Malvinas, not the Malvinos: because the implied noun with which the adjective agrees is, whether singular or plural, feminine. In Latin, Spanish, and (I’m pretty sure) Portuguese, the word for ‘island’ is feminine, hence Portuguese ‘Formosa’ and Spanish ‘Malvinas’.

Of course, Montana is not an island but a landlocked state. However, most of the Latin words for political units are also feminine, for instance respublica or res publica and civitas (‘commonwealth’), terra (‘land’), and provincia (‘province’). There are exceptions, but Montana, as a state, was never an empire or kingdom (neuter imperium and regnum, respectively).

Complaining that a Latin dictionary has no separate entry for feminine montana is absurd. My Portuguese dictionary (by James L. Taylor) has no entry for formosa, because the word is listed as “formoso, –sa (adj.) beautiful, handsome”. Similarly, the form montana is included under montanus, –a, –um in Latin dictionaries, which list the masculine, feminine, and neuter in that order. (By the way, although many Latin adjectives end with –us in the nominative singular masculine, very few end with –ous and there are thousands that end in –er, –is, –ax, or other syllables.)

There are several other places with names that are Latin feminine adjectives: Argentina, Carolina, and Dominica (the island, not the republic), for instance. Why is it so hard to believe that Montana is another, when we are explicitly told that it was named from a Latin dictionary by one J. M. Ashley?

One more point: so far from being rare, the adjective montanus is used in the West Virginia state motto, montani semper liberi, “mountaineers are always free”. As in many other languages, an adjective can be used as a noun, so ‘of or pertaining to mountains’ can mean ‘mountain-man, mountaineer’: the masculine plural ending and the context suffice to make it a noun.