Baldo by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos for May 19, 2009

Baldo knows some very odd people.

Baldo probably hardly sees Billy because he knows Billy is anal retentive.

Reminds me of a friend’s kids. The kids were adopted from Mexico, but their American adoptive parents didn’t speak Spanish. One of the kids took Spanish in school, because he said people expected him to be able to speak Spanish due to his ethnic appearance.

I knew someone whose last name was Gonzales. She said people were always surprised when they found out she couldn’t speak Spanish. When asked “how could you deny your heritage?”, she pointed out that her ancestors had come to America from Spain hundreds of years ago, probably earlier than those Ukrainian (or Polish, or whatever) ancestors of her questioner – “and nobody’s really shocked if you don’t speak Ukrainian, are they?”

The people who came from their native countries should preserve the languages from their tongues so they can speak each other at their home alone. I don’t speak with my own tongue. All I know is that I have my primary American Sign Language.

Sternvogel, that’s funny…but true. Since I’m learning Spanish, it is a disappointment when I run into a Latino and (s)he doesn’t speak Spanish.

Sternvogel, that is true. I’d have wound up trilingual if my family had done that. English, Quebecois French, and Irish. I got French in school (albeit the textbook French from France) and am working on learning Irish. Your original language is Ameslan? I’ve known others like that. One was the hearing child of two deaf parents. I could tell she’d learned English as a second language but her accent was indefinable until she told her story. Of course, I also know people with Hispanic surnames who have even less Spanish than I do, and I haven’t studied the language at all except by absorption and related language work (see the French, my singing lesson Italian and post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Latin).

I believe assuming someone knows Spanish because of a Spanish last name is known as a “Senor Moment”.