Your first sentendcew appears to be a deliberate effort to keep people from choosing to assimilate by making sure they do not know what is expected of them as residents or citizens.
Your second sentence addresses a non-existent problem: no law has been legislated*, executive order issued, trial conducted, or judicial opinion issued in any language other than English. It is one more “no walking alligators without a leash” law to clutter up the books to no purpose.
*(I am sure you are eager to cast New Mexico out of the union for having the audacity to conduct state business in a bi-lingual mode, but they were using Spanish before your ancestors came to America and it is in their Constitution.)
You were carrying a fight with a particular poster from another thread into this thread with persoanl attacks and I am sure you DO know that, despite your weaseling.
Stop it.
Meh, it would never happen. As pointed out, CA has English as the official language, and prints stuff in every language under the sun. The point of the gov’t printing documents is not to make a symbolic gesture, its to convey information. If the gov’t in areas with large foreign populations are forbidden by law from forbidden from communicating with their residents, it would just lead to a lot of pissed of US employees in areas with large foreign populations.
And really, is screwing over a large portion of the population in some areas just to make a symbolic point about “common denominators” really worth it.
Just wanted to state that I understand your Moderation in this matter.
(Is “Moderation” correct when referring to the duty of a Moderator? Or is it a subtle slam against Immoderate Moderators? Not that I’ve ever noticed any here.)
This is also an issue here in Ireland and all over the EU. In Ireland as well as non-English speakers from the other two dozen or so EU states we have a large and increasing immigrant community from Russia, Africa, Asia, South America and other places. Funnily enough in our case Irish is our first official language but it is largely symbolic, English being the working language of the majority.
The good thing about making English the official language is that it puts the onus on the non-English speaker, rather than the taxpayers, to either learn the language or bring along their own translator (son/daughter/spouse/ friend etc). Making the government conduct its business in multiple languages makes an already slow and unresponsive bureaucracy even worse.
The only exception I would make would be for an indigent criminal defendant, who is entitled to a fair trial and due process, which cannot be provided if the defendant doesn’t understand the language.
Not to mention the horrendous effects it would have on education of their children. English-only education tends to be the fastest way to help kids learn to speak English. At the same time, it’s the best way to get them to fall irrevocably behind in every single other subject, and it leads to skyrocketing dropout rates as these children are never able to reach expected standards in math, science, social studies, etc. Bilingual education is the way to go in this regard whenever possible.
Government business is sometimes conducted with the aid of an interpreter whose wages are paid with tax dollars. Would English-only mean no more interpreters at trial?
Incorrect. I don’t want to belabor this, but my comment had to do with her post in this thread. I pointed out the other thread as proof of her tendency to cry racism. So, no weaseling. On my part, anyway.
Of course no one has claimed that any law has been legislated, etc., in a non-English language. But there was some clown senator who decided to give a little speech in Spanish, which we discussed before. You viewed it, if I recall correctly, as a symbolic gesture to his constituency back home. Okay, should every legislator with a non-English speaking constituency by allowed to give a speech in that tongue? Should we have each of these speeches be given twice so the oh-so-ignorant senators or representatives who don’t speak each of these languages know what is being said? Does that seem like a good way for government to operate?
So what. Ancient history at this point. You don’t see the Native American language originally spoken in the New York area used in the NY legislature, do you? And I think that if English was made Official per a constitutional amendment, problem solved. As the US constitution would supercede that of any of the states.
Clown senators sometimes read the phone book. They sometimes diagnose comatose patients by remote video. Clown senators do all sorts of stuff. This is really way down on the clownometer. Why on earth is it good government to restrict the speech of senators?
That kind of thing already has built-in limitations: if enough people agree with you that it’s foolishness, he gets voted out of office. If the majority of his constituents don’t mind, why should you get to overrule them?
While each particular constituency might be tickled pink that there language is being put forth in official government proceedings, the efficiency of those proceedings is not dictated by the whim of such constituencies. We need a government to get things done. To rules of through which our representatives meet should foster efficiency and the moving of the ball, not do the opposite.
“To rules of through which our representatives meet”? Have you considered getting a native English speaker to help you rewrite that second sentence?
In any case, I think what you’re trying to get at is a plea for forbidding the use of languages other than English in Congressional speeches on the grounds of improving government efficiency.
While I’m all for improving government efficiency myself, I have to wonder how much the occasional paragraph in a minority language thrown into a speech to please the constituents back home is really impeding it. Surely there are more important things we could focus on to improve government efficiency?
Like any official notices that the government wishe to convey to the population: health notices, labor rules, emergency procedures to escape storms, floods, or nuclear accidents, requirements for filing taxes, requirements for safe housing. If you prohibit those publications in languages other than English, you cut off those people from learning about government rules.
No laws get passed based on the Bunkum speeches that are delivered on the floor of the House or Senate. The eventual vote gets taken there, but the real work is done in committee where a congresscritter that held up a meeting to pontificate in a language that could not be understood by the rest of the committee would soon find himself or herself with too few decent committeee assignments to get elected. You really are not displaying a very good grasp of the actual workings of Congress with this complaint. 99% of all the speeches delivered are done for Bunkum and the Republic has not yet fallen over that issue. If you wish to pass a law that everything that happens on the floors of the House and Senate are meaningful, good luck, but singling out speeches in separate languages for prohibition (when there appears to have been exactly one in the last 218 years), is a nearly classic example of a violation of the Do Not Kill Gnats With A Sledghammer rule of common sense.
Today is not ancient history. New Mexico is currently a bi-lingual state, (and has been for its entire 95 year history) and you are attempting to disenfranchise them for some odd notion of lock-step conformity without demonstrating that there is anything (outside your odd claims for “logic”) to support our trampling on their rights and laws.
So, you’ve got what? Roughly 43 years left as an English-speaking majority?
Enjoy them. I won’t be around to see it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see “Spanglish” become a language all of its own by them. It’s already quite common in parts of Little Cuba in Miami and NY’s Spanish Harlem.
So someone who doesn’t speak English turns up at the courthouse or town office or whatever without an interpreter. How is not allowing the employees there to communicate with them in their native language going to make the bureaucracy more efficient?
Not every one in the US speaks English, and this has been the case for the the last 200 years. I don’t see the advantage of pretending that non-English speakers don’t exist.
Would the rule against government documents in languages other than english apply to the State Department? Would the ambassador to Japan be allowed to speak to Japanese officials in Japanese, or would we require him to speak English when he’s over in Japan representing us?
Would safety signs be allowed to be posted in languages other than english? If a Japanese tourist is mugged in New York City, would they be allowed to use a translator, or would they be kicked out of the police station if they tried?
Would children be allowed to study languages other than english in schools? Would school districts be allowed to purchase textbooks in german for their german classes? Suppose there was a student who spoke english, but their parents spoke only chinese, and the school district wished to communicate with the parents of the child. Would they be allowed to find someone who spoke Chinese so they could talk to the parents about their child?
If there’s a hurricane warning Louisiana, would we only allow hurricane warnings in English? How about after the hurricane, when government workers are passing out water and blankets, would they be allowed to speak to the people they are helping in French?
We recognize the reality of the situation that many people in this country—citizens, non-citizens, tourists whose money we desperately want—don’t speak/read English as well as we would like, and so we do our best to figure out how to communicate with them, whether that means printing special signs/documents, bringing in an interpreter, or bringing in someone who knows sign language.
We decide that all government business must be conducted in English, damn the torpedoes, and wind up with short-order cooks who don’t understand signs telling them to wash their hands properly (you can eat in that restaurant; I’ll patronize the one with bilingual signage from the health dept.), sick or injured persons who can’t tell EMS providers what’s wrong with them, witnesses to crimes who aren’t allowed to testify in court and thereby put criminals behind bars, accused defendants who automatically go to prison since they cannot defend themselves in court…
I’d rather live in (1). I honestly don’t see the big deal. I’ve lived in Queens, NYC, where there were 1st-generation Greeks, Croatians, Brazilians, Mexicans, Ecuadorans, Indians, Pakistanis, Palestinians, Chinese, Koreans, Russians, Italians, and heaven knows who else living on my block. We all managed to cope just fine. Actually, I quite miss it. Now, I’m in a place with a huge Mexican population. My wife works all day with people whose first language is Spanish. It’s not a big deal. They work to learn English, my wife works to learn Spanish. The HR dept. brought in a translator to give the 401(k) presentation in Spanish. Personally, I find it fantastic.
Not so much to improve it now, because as you say it’s not done much now. But as the U.S. becomes more polylingual there will be increased incidence of this, so I think stopping it now would be beneficial in avoiding problems down the road.
Have you considered getting a native English speaker to help you rewrite that second sentence? 
