Arizona to vote on offical language

[cookiepuss]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060622/ap_on_re_us/immigration_arizona

"Arizona lawmakers agreed to let voters decide whether to deny more state services to illegal immigrants and whether to make English the state's official language."

I guess I'm confused. I thought that the "offical language of the united states was English. and I thought Arizona was a member of the united States, thus wouldn't it's official language already be english? or does the united states have no offical language.

and how exactly is makinf english the offical language going to stop immagrants fro wanting to come here? we've been speaking english oh I don't know since the inception of the country and imigrants from all over the world have come to live here. unless they just think that making enclish the offical language will force them to learn it. but I kinda don't think it's going to have much of an impact.

[Bob]

i don't believe that the US has an "official" language. state governments, i believe, are allowed to choose their own (10th amendment, hooray, i learned something useful from college!)

making english the OFFICIAL language, i believe, would make it legal to make all state documents english-only. i think. meaning that if anyone wants to get anything done through the state, they have to know enlgish, because the state wouldn't be obliged to provide anything in their own language.

i think. i'm honestly not 100% sure about that part. don't quote me.

i've always been of the opinion that if you're going to live in a country, you really ought to be able to speak the native tongue, at least enough to get by, but i dunno. this leaves a bad taste.

[cookiepuss]

i've always been of the opinion that if you're going to live in a country, you really ought to be able to speak the native tongue, at least enough to get by, but i dunno. this leaves a bad taste.

no I agree. when our great grandparents and what not came here, they wanted to learn english and to be american. so it was different. now people want to come here and they want to perserve thier culture without having to accept or assimilate to our standards. if we didn't want that to happen we probably should have never started printing our documents in other languages.

[synch]

i don't believe that the US has an "official" language. state governments, i believe, are allowed to choose their own (10th amendment, hooray, i learned something useful from college!)
I'd consider it marginally useful information, but well done!

[cookiepuss]

I just think we're dumb. we made it easy for imigrants legal or illegal) to come here and beable to live with out real assimilation, because we've provided them with documents in thier own language. and now we want to wine about the fact they don't learn english. as usual we created our own monster here.

[Bob]

i don't even expect people to assimilate to american culture, i respect wanting to preserve your own culture, but not at the expense of seriously inconveniencing everyone else who already lives here. like by refusing to learn the language. that makes it hard to communicate.

it seems kinda fascist to FORCE people to learn it but i don't know.

[catatonic]

Some tricksters were trying to get me to support making English into a holy language like Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic a few years back.

I have never regretted saying no.

Incidentally, I can take the 100 most common English words and show that their letter by letter spelling shows by very logical reasoning of position and path the exact correspondence to each of those words, and is the best letter-sequence for each one, so I now know it is a holy language. But I sure don't want any racist person with brain enough to see how this might be used to figure this out or spread it to the population!

Fuck! Shit! Nuts! Those words are holy too and incidentally their letter-spelling is even grosser than the words themselves. OK nuts just means a container above and a container below intersecting - the set of all possibilities tied together (as in crazy not the food, though now I see the spelling nut has to do with that word), but anyhow.