Re: But, can she speaka da anglash ?


"Gary" <not@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:7sbt15d6el2uptkjb2hmot2777q2uobqn3@xxxxxxxxxx
On Thu, 28 May 2009 07:57:07 -0400, "Hal Hanig"
<halhanig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Gary" <not@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:7rrs155un3a4759h8f2m9dt0plgi6de5pc@xxxxxxxxxx
On Wed, 27 May 2009 17:23:39 -0700 (PDT), mg <mgkelson@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On May 27, 2:41 pm, Gary <n...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 27 May 2009 12:41:22 -0700 (PDT), mg <mgkel...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On May 27, 11:10 am, Gary <n...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Another point. If we must have a Latina, couldn't we at least have
a good looking one ? This old girl's face would stop an eight day
clock.

"Despite her working class background, she attended Princeton
University and graduated summa cum laude in 1976. With her stellar
credentials, she had her pick of law schools to attend and chose to
go
to Yale Law School..." So, I doubt if there is any affirmative action
involved.
http://www.rightpundits.com/?p=2409

I've seen the same said of BO. But I've never seen any grades to back
it up. If I recall correctly what many people complained about in
the 1970s was called "race norming". That is when a person of a
chosen race would make a 65 on a test and be graded above a non-chosen
one who got a 98. That was called "stellar" :-)

Gary, the term "race norming" doesn't have anything to do with college
grades. As I said before Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from
Princeton University. So, she would have had no need for affirmative
action.

BS ! How did a poor girl from a PR family ever get into Princeton
--- except for affirmative action ?

Why does it matter? AIR, the affirmative action programs were initially
enacted to allow members of discriminated- against minorities to share in
all of the good stuff that was available to the rest of us. If she
benefited from it, it only proves that the program worked as it was
intended
to.

There's nothing wrong with her English as far as I can tell,
by the way. What makes you think she has a problem with the English
language?

When a child can't speak it at age nine, they are not always fluent
in it years later. It being her second language, I just wondered.

As a product of the NYC public school system,

Somehow, that does not surprise me.

Why? Was it supposed to?

I find it hard to believe that
a native born child who was a student in it could not speak English at the
age of nine. How about producing a little specific proof of that wild
allegation?

I will this time because I understand who it is to be multi-cultural.

Would you mind translating that sentence into understandable English? Of
course, I didn't have the benefits of a Georgia education, so perhaps I
missed something.

You need all the help you can get.

Always and I never turn it down when it's offered to me. Can you say as
much or do you think that you already know it all and couldn't possibly get
anything wrong?

Got a reliable cite for that other than the usual crap put out
by the RNC and their slime meisters?

According to wikepedia -- who seem reasonably fair ---

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor

"...Sonia's father died at age 42, in part from heart complications,
when she was nine years old. After this was when Sonia first became
fluent in English...."

I'd actually looked at that cite before my last posting, but had not read
the parts about her earlier life and education. IAC, I learned from it that
we had both lived in the same part of the Bronx, which in my day was
Italian-American in its character. Its character and population changed
after I had left it. That said, I still question the accuracy of the
comment about her English speaking abilities as a child. While Wikipaedia
is an interesting source for a lot of information, it's only as good as the
information the voluntary posters put into it, and when they get it wrong,
Wikipaedia gets it wrong.

Just as an aside, when I was growing up, English was not the only language
used in our home. It didn't seem to hurt me in terms of my ability to use
the English language any more than it did my kid sister who, to this day,
is
a copy editor who makes her living insuring that book authors use English
correctly (among other things), or my older brother who seemed to
understand
it well enough to work on the development of the atom bomb and atomic
energy
from almost its very beginning. We were all products of the system she
went
through later on and it didn't seem to hurt any of us.

My point, just in case it escapes you Georgia purists, is that the use of
a
second language in a child's home does not necessarily correlate with the
child's ultimate mastery of the English language. AAMOF, in a lot of
ways,
it can enrich that language by the inclusion of foreign words and phrases
into it.

What it usually does is compounds the ignorance of the older
generation.

Would you mind explaining to us how that works? Are you suggesting that
Justice Alito, who undoubtedly grew up in a home in which Italian was spoken
as often as English, is somehow ignorant because his parents, in a moment of
possible frustration, might have called him a "chiddrool, a cabbadost, or a
stroonz" for having done something stupid as most kids do from time to time?
You don't know your ass from a hole in the ground if you think that
ignorance is somehow transferred from adults to children through the use of
a foreign language.

Albert Einstein spoke Yiddish and possible German in his home when he was
growing up and it didn't seem to have any negative effect on his mental
capacities. I don't have to tell you who Albert Einstein was, do I?


.....Who would not be in America had they been not been successful in the
old country.

I hate to admit it, but you've tortured the syntax in that sentence so badly
that I can't quite figure out how to respond to it. Are you saying that
immigrants had to have been successful in the old country in order to have
become immigrants into our country? Back around the turn of the last
century when the bulk of our immigration from Europe took place, what you
had to be in order to get an entry visa into the country was capable of
supporting yourself and you had to have somebody already in our country who
would accept legal responsibility for you in order to prevent you from
becoming a public charge if things didn't work well for you. In point of
fact, the vast majority of immigrants were NOT successful business persons
or professionals, but rather were in far larger parts competent artisans and
craftsmen and their families.

Did I answer what looked like it should have been a question if you'd
remembered to end it with a question mark but didn't?

Hal


.

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