Iowa Aviation Weather...en Espanol

"JH" == Jay Honeck writes:

JH This thread is about foreign language weather websites being
JH paid for with US taxpayer dollars.

No, Jay, this thread is about your bigotry and small-mindedness which
raises up every few weeks. If you cared about government waste you'd
be raising hell about the incredible waste going on in Iraq, courtesy
of neocons like yourself. Or do you still think that democracy is
going to flower in that miserable place?

Kinda funny, actually, us posters giving you--a history major--the
most basic lessons in history.

--
Instead of mousetraps, what about baby traps? Not to harm the
babies, but just to hold them down until they can be removed?
- Jack Handey

"CJ" == C J Campbell C writes:
CJ Come on, Jay. This is KKK stuff you're
CJ spouting. And I know you don't believe in that.

Uh--and how do you know he doesn't believe in that?

Every few weeks Jay posts some utterly off-topic crap here that
invariably reveals his narrow and often bigoted beliefs. It's always
some disadvantaged group (the working poor, hispanics) that's going to
run this country to hell in a handbasket.

Every time I've visited the midwest or south I run into people who are
racists right below the surface. They must think I'm safe to talk to
because within minutes they start blaming any incident in town on the
blacks, or mexicans, or whatever group they don't like. It's
something you rarely encounter in California. Most of our bigots have
moved to Idaho I think. Or maybe Iowa, I dunno.
--
Contrary to what most people say, the most dangerous animal in
the world is not the lion or the tiger or even the elephant. It's
a shark riding on an elephant's back, just trampling and eating
everything they see.
- Jack Handey

Tony writes:

Puerto Rico is both largely Spanish speaking, part of the United
States, and literate.

Now will you reconsider your statement, or will this stand as another
example when you were demonstrated to have made an incorrect or
misleading statement?

Puerto Rico does not invalidate my generalization.

--
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Peter Dohm writes:

A high percentage of the Spanish speaking population is highly educated and
highly litterate. They simply have the same problem in English that I have
in Spanish--they started learning it much too late. It is easy to become
fully proficient (and free of obvious accents) in a new language as a child,
diffecult as an adolescent, and frequently unsuccessfull as an adult.

That's entirely incorrect. I _teach_ English, and anyone can learn it at any
age ... if he wants to. What you describe is the standard excuse for people
who are too lazy to learn English. And highly educated, highly literate
people usually already speak English, as that is part of an education today
throughout the world.

--
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You left the Triangle for Madison -- how can we trust your judgement
in other things? You probably had to buy a snow blower.




On Feb 13, 10:25 pm, wrote:
This is purely anecdotal, but so is everything else on this thread.
Where I used to work in Raleigh, North Carolina, we had a fairly heavy
immigrant Spanish speaking only population that we served. We had in
house 24/7 interpreters (as opposed to translators, there is a
difference I learned), and I asked one of them about the paperwork we
handed out that was in Spanish. Could they even read it? The consensus
was that most of them were illiterate in Spanish, which was eye
opening to me as we had a fair bit of money invested in software that
could spit things out for printing in either language....
Food for thought.

Ryan in Madison

C J Campbell writes:

Well, not really. I think they have always spoken Spanish in Puerto Rico.

So they weren't bilingual, were they?

This is a freedom issue -- free trade and free men.

Freedom implies responsibility. Those who refuse to take responsibility for
their own destinies cannot complain about a lack of freedom.

Walls and restrictions have never been good for business.

So a requirement for bilingualism must not be good for business.

If it helps to keep money flowing smoothly and makes life a little easier for
some people, I really don't have a problem with multi-lingual weather
briefings.

It doesn't. People who can't speak English are likely to be illiterate in
Spanish as well, and they aren't likely to have much in the way of PCs or
Internet access.

It makes it easier for
people who don't speak English to visit Iowa, stay at your hotel, eat your
food, and so forth.

No, it doesn't. For that, _everything_ would have to be in Spanish (and
they'd have to be able to read).

Are you really telling me you don't have anything to
offer them, that you can't make a buck off this?

The potential revenue is far too small to justify the cost.

--
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Hamish Reid writes:

A language spoken continuously by indigenous US citizens in the
US and that long predates the use of English in the US is "foreign"?

Yes.

As with Jim M., I'm guessing that for you the phrase "foreign language"
means something like "non-official language", or "non-dominant
language", or "language I don't speak", or "language some foreigners
use", rather than what the phrase might mean to many of the rest of us,
something like "a language not spoken by the indigenous peoples of a
certain area" (to steal a definition from somewhere else)?

A language not spoken by the mainstream.

--
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C J Campbell writes:

As for aliens, both legal and illegal, they are hard to count, but most
reliable counts indicate about 11 million who speak only Spanish. That would
be a total of 40 million Spanish speakers in the US.

Kick the illegal aliens out, and you can reduce that figure by several
million. Although 40 million is quite an exaggeration.

I am disturbed by the apparent assumption that any Spanish speaker must be an
illegal alien.

Who has made that assumption?

The vast majority of Spanish speakers in the US are citizens.
A lot of them are descended from people who were living in what is now the
USA long before the Mayflower ever got here. It really is ignorant not to
know that.

They are pretty ignorant not to speak English. I guess they want to clean
toilets all their lives.

--
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On Feb 12, 3:40 pm, "Jay Honeck" wrote:
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/forecast/Map...DVN&map.x=121&...

(orhttp://tinyurl.com/39s8j5if that URL wraps...)

Does anyone else find it disturbing that the National Weather Service
in the United States is paying out taxpayer money to a government
employee to create a foreign-language web page?
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Jay
por supuesto pero yo pienso mas gente en estado unidos falta educacion
como otro pieses y lenguas. Esta claro que mas latinos viene aqui y el
mundo es cambiando. No cambio o adjustamente por el individual, el es
muerte en la agua.
Times are changing my friend. I am one of the most adamant in the USA
regarding the use of english as our language but I fear I am ****ing
in the wind. In most of the foreign countries I worked in, I had to
learn at least a modicum of the language to survive. It is indeed
unfortunate that our education system, and by extension, most
Americans, never learn a foreign language well enough to carry on a
simple conversation in anything but english.
To that end, I am making an effort to teach my new son several
languages while he is still in the early stages of speech development
so he'll be able to function in a multi-lingual world.
You should have seen me raising hell in a post office in CA where all
the signs were in spanish. I made enough of a stink that all the signs
were duplicated in english by the end of the week.
I guess it beats being in arabic......or Finnish? ggg
Ol Shy & Bashful

("Bob Noel" wrote)
How many citizens can only read/write Spanish?
Citizens.
Trick question! :-)


the citizenship test doesn't require being able to speak english. you
can take it in your own language if you pay/provide a translator.

just like in court, they will get a translator if a witness or
defendant doesn't speak english.

(all this i know from being surrounded by Russians who just recently
came here and don't speak enough english to be useful)