PC Demands for Native Pronunciation

Political correctness in my home land is going to the extent of now demanding correct pronuncation of Maori - our indigenous people - place names. A voice artist hit local headlines just today for refusing to pronounce such names as Waimate "the white way" calling such racist. We say Why Mat ee. The Maori way is something i cannot produce here though I am , I believe competent enopugh to say it as they require, if I saw the point

So I wrote to our country's Maori language comission, an august body set up to oversee the development  of Te Reo Maori  - the Maori Language

Sirs,

well might i approve your support of the voice artist refusing to pronounce the name waimate the white way as appeared on todays MSN news feed.

But i would encourage you to apply this fine principle consistently. If it is low level racism to mispronounce Waimate or Hauraki it is surely by the same principle racism to mispronounce Paris . It is Paree with the r slightly rolled. Moscow is Mosk va – stress  on the second syllable. Berlin is Bare Leen, Nuremberg is Nourn berg – very very careful attention being paid to the umlaut, which my computer cannot  produce, over the u in the name. Rome is Roma. Warsaw is Varshawa  and don’t get me started on names really out of the European comfort zone like the proper form of Jerusalem – Yaru Shalayim.  And perhaps if we were to listen to native Cockneys then London is Lunnin

Let us not confine ourselves to being Politically Correct over  local Maori place names, lest that be seen to be selectively racist in its own light. You want a sacrifice of effort over Maori place names? then be prepared to make it over other place names

Of course you see the irony here.

Demands to pronounce place names are in fact coerced speech; and coerced speech is tyranny.

If you as native English speakers cannot master the correct pronunciation of Paris etc  you grasp my point. Not only that but you manifest it. Native English speakers cannot get Maori place names either and your demand that they do, being inconsistent, is mere petulant

You do not get a genuine sense of national identity by coercion and your petulant demands will alienate many

By the way, lest you think me a racist, the common mispronunciation of Maori as Mari bothers me. I like to say I have in fact met a Mari person. She came from the autonomous republic of Mari El, one of the regions of Russia, properly called Rossiya, some 300 miles east of Moskva. But then i have no intention of forcing this on anyone

in  celebration of my own European roots i beg the honour or remaining your most obedient and humble servant

Stephen Meikle  ( that would be Stefanos to you for the name is Greek)

I do have some Maori ancestry but do you think i would rejoice in that when you want to foist by force of law Maori culture on people. Consider it

Christchurch

28 04 2018

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These are of coure first world problems from people in enough luxury  and wealth to now demand that their feelings be regarded as sacred by our viewing things sacred that they do. Of course they regard white culture with contempt and loathe christianity, but flatly refuse to see the racism in their own demands, for they define racism as only  white hating - or only didsagreeing with, for to them that is hatred -  black

I will some time soon, as the mood takes me, do a piece on why i am not politically correct

How Do I Know that I Believe

I have always been given to philosophic rumination, so the question of what is belief, as opposed to knowledge,  and how do I know I believe something, given the nature of the sin of unbelief,  has worried me for a long time.

But it now occurs to me that I will  know that I believe something  when  it becomes to my mind simply the way things are, almost  - but perhaps only almost - something to be taken for granted as regards it s propositional truth.

I hold this to be the case with any belief, this, I submit,  by being  the nature of belief, for I am not considering the TRUTH of any belief in this instance. Just the nature of it.

But as regards true christian belief, a different matter, I agree,  it will be something that I no longer have to pick at, worry about, be quick to defend, or even talk about very often. Unless it fills me with joy, of course.

It will be my life  but not my obsession, no longer driven by the guilt ridden awareness of my own deep seated unbelief.

I contend that  I see this in many preachers and even apologists. It is a waste of both time and effort for if they are to grow in Christ they will have to acknowledge the unbelief and thus their wasted efforts to reach honest belief and the peace that comes from it

Of course as regards spiritual things I get there by being  convicted of the sins of my own resistance to the thing in question and then by His grace as my counsellor, one on one, to repent of them.

I have found this a process over time, for it is a quarrel between God and me which I must  engage in and indeed go through lest I hide my sin and perish.

In this instance it is a particular idol that has ruled my life so strongly that  prefer it to the love of the Father.

As I repent as led by the Spirit my thinking will be changed, as I now suspect  is the nature of  belief  itself  as I have described it above.

Intellectual assent to a proposition, what so many Christians call faith, is nothing of the sort. it is the bare beginning.

But the goal is to be transformed by the renewal of the mind