So yesterday’s blog that Mitt Romney perhaps should consider spelling his name Romñey given his Mexican heritage got me thinking about the use of accents in names and words when presented visually on English-language television.  More and more, television stations and newspapers are using accents and punctuation marks to spell properly the names of individuals, places and things.  Little by little, the media is reflecting the new demography of the country. Programming and content – especially news content – are still not what they should be, but it was not that long ago that televised weathercasts and weather reports exemplified the worst of what is now archaic thinking.  The maps on camera captured only the outline of the United States so that cold or wet fronts pushing in from the Pacific over the West Coast seemingly stopped blowing just south of San Diego.  The area where most viewers knew México existed was vast, blank space.  Now, most weather reports now present the entire topography and geography of the continent naturally and include the temperatures and conditions in most of the major cities there but many reports include the cities of islands of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

Much of the change has to do with the modern propensity of almost anyone to jet down to Cancún for a long weekend or of a farmer in Iowa wondering if his wheat is getting past the latest tropical depression off Nicaragua.  He or she wants to see the whole map.

Yet, no pun intended, this is new territory, indeed, and one cannot expect everyone to know the accenting rules of Spanish.  But, things have changed.  Years ago I wrote a column in which I expressed ambivalence about how some non-HispanicLatinos shortened and Texanized the name of the city of San Antonio into ‘San An-tone’ but I have not heard that reiteration in years.  It would bother me now.  As the public changes, so do public mores, traditions and customs – and language.

Some researchers think that the first Spanish-language newspaper in what would become the United States was El Misispí that originated in New Orleans in 1808.  The accenting of the Native American word ‘Mississippi’ is an oddity and no one these would ever want to think about adding accents to the state’s or river’s name.

As soon as one enters the word of accenting, of course, comes the natural problem that issues from it:  How on-camera personalities or officials pronounce their names in public.  Herein, market forces as judged by television and radio station owners begin to make their presence known.   In an area as sophisticated as Boston, for example, an area not as numerously populated with HispanicLatinos compared to other parts of the country, any news presenter presumably could pronounce his or her name as desires.  But that probably does not hold in Georgia.  Though the pronunciation of one’s name concerns the First Amendment, it no doubt will be a matter that will be more carefully considered given the transitional nature of some markets.

But on-camera HispanicLatino personalities who do not pronounce their surnames properly sound and look silly – like the eñe over Romñey.

His name should be respected in its natural state; and so should Treviño. And Obregón, Sánchez, Peña, Cantú…

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