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When is posting in Spanish against any of the forum rules and grounds for deletion?

karl wrote:When is posting in Spanish against any of the forum rules and grounds for deletion?

Why would you want to?????

Because we have no fluient Spanish moderators & therefore are not able to moderate it.

Why would I want to? Someone made a rude comment about Mexican housekeepers so I said, in Spanish, that lots of my Mexican friends can probably speak better English than most of the general population. I then corrected the individual's insensitive quip of a sign intended to better "communicate" to our Latino brethren.

Guess the deleting makes sense, online translators are no substitute.

karl wrote:Why would I want to? Someone made a rude comment about Mexican housekeepers so I said, in Spanish, that lots of my Mexican friends can probably speak better English than most of the general population. I then corrected the individual's insensitive quip of a sign intended to better "communicate" to our Latino brethren.

Guess the deleting makes sense, online translators are no substitute.

In what post did someone make a rude comment about Mexican housekeepers? Why type a post that not everyone could read. Just cause I live in Texas doesn't mean I read/write or understand spoken spanish.

Well if that individual wanted to poke fun at a stereotype that Latino housekeepers don't understand English than I'll knock on the stereotype that lazy white people (assumption) don't know Spanish.

Also, just because you don't know Spanish doesn't mean others don't.

Which post?

karl wrote:Well if that individual wanted to poke fun at a stereotype that Latino housekeepers don't understand English than I'll knock on the stereotype that lazy white people (assumption) don't know Spanish.

Also, just because you don't know Spanish doesn't mean others don't.

emmmm. but we dont live in a country that should require us to know it.... after all this is an english speaking country.
yo vivo en EEUU.

I absolutely agree with you about speaking the native language in a country. But does that mean we shouldn't learn other languages? Of course not. I've witnessed white people in both Spain and Mexico make fools of themselves because they didn't speak the language. Kind of embarrassed me and I had to translate for them.

We are not in spain or mexico. Welcome to Texas.
Carl

It works both ways. While growing up in Houston didn't lead to me automatically becoming fluent in any other languages, I did develope an uncanny ability to understand thickly accented broken English from the world over. We are, after all, "the international city".

I never considered anyone foolish for not speaking perfect English, nor did I think they were lazy.

RocTrac wrote:We are not in spain or mexico. Welcome to Texas.
Carl

Thanks, been here for 22 years. I think you're missing the point.

mctowalot wrote:I never considered anyone foolish for not speaking perfect English, nor did I think they were lazy.

Never said you did.

karl wrote:I absolutely agree with you about speaking the native language in a country. But does that mean we shouldn't learn other languages? Of course not. I've witnessed white people in both Spain and Mexico make fools of themselves because they didn't speak the language. Kind of embarrassed me and I had to translate for them.

So far as Im concerned I do speak,read,and understand enugh spanish to get by on in this country or there's it not the greatist but I can do it if the non native has some patiance. I also know a little of a few other's. However I view it as kind of a sad thing I have had to learn it at all in as im not the one that has chosen to live in a non-native invironment.

Ah, to hopefully apply a little levity to the topic, there is a linguistic joke that goes like this:

If you speak three languages, you're trilingual.
If you speak two languages, you're bilingual.
If you speak one language, you're an American

There are two sides in this conversation: The first is that somebody said something insensitive and somebody wanted to correct them. The second is that they wanted to conduct it in another language.

While spanish is certainly a common "second language" in Texas, there are a number of cultural and historical reasons why isn't not an official second language. I would suggest that it is a harmless matter to clearly add a new forum rule that the forum is English-only. That eliminates the overall concern.

Personally, I am relatively conversant in French and fluent in Esperanto (a vestige of my overly-liberal youth ), but I don't think I would post anything in either language in an attempt to drive home a point.

Are we and each other?