Watch your W’s and Q’s
Imagine the owners of business with signs featuring Spanish or some other language. Now imagine those owners being arrested and fined for including the letter ñ in their signs. This is what happened in Turkey. There they have the equivalent of Jim Crow law for Kurds. One of these laws, which bans the use of any letters not included in the adapted Roman script used in Turkish, happens to make signs posted in the Kurdish language illegal. Here is the article from CNN on the recent arrests.
Unbelievable.
I know that in Maryland there was a big kerfuffle over an elementary school where they started having all students recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish on some days (who knows why…but they did).
In any case, the contrast is striking. What would be the punishment if these Kurds had dared speak Kurdish to customers? The horror! Off with their heads!
Comment by doug — October 25, 2005 @ 7:19 pm