Almost a year ago I posted about the revival of Polyglot Vegetarian, which had been dormant since 2012; now MMcM has had another burst of activity, making five consecutive posts about versions of the Lord’s Prayer in many, many languages. The first begins:
A post in the autumn of an election year sixteen years ago covered the chapter mottoes in The Gilded Age. These were supplied to Twain and Warner by James Hammond Trumbull, friend and neighbor of the former. Trumbull has appeared here before and since, most recently in connection with Maize.
Of specific interest to this blog, a paper by Trumbull, published in 1872, with “Notes on Forty Versions of the Lord’s Prayer in Algonkin Languages,” remarked:
Bread was not the staff of life to an Indian, and his little corn-cake, baked in hot ashes, was perhaps about the last thing he would remember to pray for. So, on “daily bread,” translators were left to a large discretion. The diversity of judgment manifested in the selection of a corresponding Indian word is noticeable.
There are several possible high-level approaches.
(I wrote about that epigraphs post here.) The post ends with a long list of polyglot collections of Pater Noster versions and the questions:
What do these collections say about the faith or obsessions of the collectors, or the power of their backers, or about the languages, or the glyphs used to record them, or about the speakers themselves? Is the Lord’s Prayer a particularly good choice for a canonical text to compare?
There follow posts 2, 3, 4, and 5; just scrolling down the posts I quail at the thought of the time and labor that went into them. Pauca sed matura, that’s MMcM’s motto! (And yes, Kusaal shows up, in Post 5.)
Also, John Costello wrote me about the Endangered Alphabets Calligraphy kickstarter, which has only a few days left to run; if you want to help it meet its goal, you know what to do.
And yes, Kusaal shows up
Hey, I get a footnote reference in Michael Wandusim’s book! Fame at last!
(He actually contacted me to ask about it. I was a bit surprised to be cited by a theologian, but professed myself honoured.)
Kusaal diib is straightforwardly “food”, incidentally. “Bread” is an exotic foreign food in those parts, of course. Real People eat (millet) porridge.
Assuming ἐπιούσιον means what it is usually supposed to mean, the Agolle Kusaal version is actually a mistranslation (a thing I never actually noticed before.) Literally, it’s “(and) give us today’s food, like you give to us every day.” It is essentially unchanged from the 1976 New Testament, and I imagine that it’s got hallowed by usage, so the revisers left it alone.
The 2023 Toende Kusaal version is more accurate:
Tɩme tɩɩ tɩ daa woo dɩɩpa zĩna.
“Give us every-day’s food today.”
The Mooré version is much the same:
Kõ-y tõnd d daar o daar dɩɩbã dũndã.
“Give (pl) us our day-to-day food today.”
(Mooré has the 2nd person plural honorific for singular thing, like French. It never caught on among the bolshy Kusaasi. They’re not into that king/chief/nobility stuff.)
Give us this day our onion naan.
Today there are many kinds of bread available in Europe alone. A lot of them are versions of “traditional recipes”, as the advertisements claim, but I surmise that they have been gussied up for modern palates. The older confections must already have been quite different from each other, since they were of necessity based on grains available locally,
Could it be that many Americans think of daily bread as “white sandwich bread”, and wonder why there is no request for peanut butter to go with it ?
Give us this day our onion naan
That will be in the version made by the Mission to the Claytons. Bible translators are much more culturally aware these days.
Perhaps ἐπιούσιον was intended to have the sense of “basic nourishment”, so that’s why [insert Ancient Greek word for “bread”] was not used by itself. Readers could understand by that “bread”, “fish” or whatever they were accustomed to. A clever move. (I don’t think “suprasubstantial” helps here).
Today we might pray “give us this day what floats our boat”.
Nah, the word for “bread” is there in the Greek too. ʾEπιούσιον (whatever it means) is an adjective in agreement with it. Some kinda bread. Naan bread has not hitherto been suggested AFAIK, but I am no New Testament scholar.
In Semtic, possibly the chain of meanings of *laḥm and its reflexes was ‘meat’ > ‘food’ > ‘bread’ > ‘food’.
The Mampruli version has
Tim ti zuna ti beoo kam bundirigu
“Give us today our daily edible thing.”
which seems to cover all the bases.
(Beoo kam looks funny from a Kusaal viewpoint, as it looks like it ought to mean “every morning”, but it does indeed seem to be the usual Mampruli idiom for “every day.” So the Mamprussi are not in fact just praying for reliable breakfasts.)
@Y, is the direction of shift based on hypothetical herding > farming historical shift or there are linguistic/philological arguments for it?
@Y, is the direction based on hypothetical herding > farming historical shift or there are linguistic/philological arguments for it?
Moba just has
Te’ti dinne yaa jied.
“Give us food today.”
They don’t beat about the bush, those Moba. Straight to the point. You have to respect that. (I may have missed some nuances here …)
Nawdm has the somewhat dull but unexeptionable
Si-t jana t goor diit.
“Give us today our day’s food.”
[Actually, it’s not so dull. I didn’t know si- “give”, which turns out to be a defective verb that only appears in the perfective aspect. It looks related to the Kusaal ti- “give”, via a somewhat perplexing but well-attested sporadic alternation between initial alveolars and palatals in proto-Oti-Volta (Nawdm s is regularly from POV *c.)]
The cultural practices and symbolic understandings of the times and places in which the Scriptures first appeared were often quite different from those of modern Western societies, and there is plenty of Biblical imagery that at first glance is kinda baffling. Take the simile in Ps. 132/133 “It is like the precious oil upon the head, that ran down unto the beard, * even unto Aaron’s beard, and went down to the skirts of his clothing.” Modern Westerners, even the most pious, generally do not have positive associations with the idea of having some sort of olive oil dumped on their head in sufficient quantity that it drips down through the beard and onto their clothes, but it’s clearly intended as a positive image and the modern (Western) Psalm-hearer/reader is expected to just roll with that, hopefully with the help of competent exegesis. And there are many less dramatic examples as when modern Westernizers think they have an understanding of farming or sheepherding from children’s books or what have you that is in fact a romanticized illusion at quite dramatic variance with the grubby realities of those modes of making a life such that they can easily miss the point of a lot of agricultural/pastoral imagery.
It is only when it comes to translations for so-called Primitive Peoples that the assumption suddenly becomes that the poor dears don’t share our cultural understanding of bread so we’d best paraphrase the text into something else that won’t be so confusing for them.
@drasvi, from what I can tell, it’s a handwavy guess. The only language with the ‘meat’ meaning is Arabic. So you could say that Bedouins have continuously preserved the reliance on hunting, and retained the original meaning. Maybe? I also saw a suggestion to support the original ‘meat’ meaning by equating the root to the identical root *lḥm ‘to fight’, connecting it somehow with hunting.
Equally plausibly IMO, ‘food’ > ‘bread’ and ‘food’ > ‘meat’ independently.
@JWB:
Some of the more hip and happening modern English versions do paraphrase such things away pretty freely. But Aaron’s beard does get oiled in all the versions I can see, albeit sometimes with added background material inserted.
https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Psalm%20133%3A2
Even the Welsh online Beibl.net, which is not designed for traditionalists at all (so to speak) just goes with it literally:
Mind you, this version seems to be something of a one-man show, and I get the impression that extensive paraphrasing in aid of understanding by the completely uninitiated got to be too much for him sometimes.
Separately I am pleased to learn from MMcM’s post of the supposed one-time existence of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artotyrite heresy. So many drearier heresies have been revived (sometimes unconsciously by independent reinvention of the key error) in modern times it seems a pity that this one isn’t out there and evangelizing.
@Y:
Well. there’s Hausa nama “meat” …
(Actually, that’s usually taken to be a loan from Volta-Congo. Cf Buli lam “meat” … but that way the Ruhlen madness lies … aargh, make it stop …)
On semantic shifts in “food” words: Gulmancema dibu, undoubtedly an exact cognate of Kusaal diib “food”, means “millet” (the plant itself, not food made from it); it’s the same throughout the Gurma subgroup.
There’s no doubt that Kusaal preserves the original sense: it’s from the “eat” root *dɪ, which appears everywhere from Côte d’Ivoire to South Africa. (I even saw what looks enticingly like a reflex of it in one of the lesser-known Dogon languages, Toro Tegu, whuch seems to be something of an outlier within Dogon.)
See also Magnus Pharao Hansen’s post on Uto-Aztecan bighorn sheep / meat / beans / nopales.
Yes. Interesting and apposite.
Ethiopic lahm means “cow”, but it’s got the wrong middle consonant to go with bread/meat. A bridge too far …
SED sez, “Gez. lāhm ‘ox, bulľ and Soq lʼéḥim ‘big fish, shark’ are definitely unrelated to this root. The meaning shift from ‘bread’ to ‘meat’ represents a comparatively late innovation in Arabic (Fronazroli 1972:615).” Kogan’s book, the predecessor to SED, is more diplomatic: “One is tempted to agree with P. Fronzaroli (1972:615), who believes that the meaning shift from ‘bread’ to ‘meat’ represents a comparatively late innovation in Arabic.”
I haven’t seen Fronzaroli’s article (Studi sul lessico comune semitico. VII. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rendiconti lincei. Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche VIII/XXVI/7, 12:603–643), so I don’t know his arguments.
“There were women prophesying at Carthage, and prophecy was considered a genuine charism” (from WP: Montanism from WP:Artotyrite)
Some news about my favorite region (not Carthage specifically, just North Africa) and gender.
And yes “bread and cheesers” sounds good. “…or perhaps baked bread with cheese. Khachapuri-ers then (not sure how do you say -ers in Georgian). Or pizzaioli.
Seems to me this is just a standing invitation to schism.
Emmentalers against Wensleydalers, Gruyerites against Jarlsbergers … it’s going to get nasty very soon.
I think a მეხაჭაპურე mexač̣apure (pl. მეხაჭაპურეები mexač̣apureebi) is someone who makes khachapuri. See here for the circumfix.
Emmentalers against Wensleydalers, Gruyerites against Jarlsbergers … it’s going to get nasty very soon.
Stinking Bishops…
(P.S. Wallace and Gromit reportedly saved both Wensleydale and Stinking Bishop from oblivion.)
my favorite region (not Carthage specifically, just North Africa)
You will be interested in my posts about the Circumcellions: 2007, 2015.
The Artotyrites were just pointing the way towards American midwestern Christians enjoying grilled cheese sandwiches. Now if you substitute Campbell‘s Tomato Soup as the blood of Christ, it becomes clear that the American Lutheranism is clearly the fulfillment of the Artotyrite mission.
Wallace and Gromit reportedly saved both Wensleydale and Stinking Bishop from oblivion.
Wensleydale was never anywhere near oblivion — in Yorkshire. Stinking Bishop was always teetering on the edge of oblivion — fewer than a hundred of the Old Gloucester breed.
I, too, would have been surprised to hear that Wensleydale had been seriously threatened.
WP says as much; though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wensleydale_cheese
Citations and everything.
“Stinking Bishop” obviously needs a rebrand. “Fragrant Prelate”?
David E.’s concern about the factionalism and fissiparousness of cheese snobs seems well-placed, yet I will note that ex ante you might have predicted the very same about wine snobs, yet most churches seem to have successfully gotten away with using lowest-common-denominator vin ordinaire (often sweeter than a snobbish palate would prefer in other settings) as the relevant ingredient for confecting the Eucharist and have avoided schisms driven by rival advocates of particular varietals or AOC’s. Whether a worldwide artotyrite movement would have successfully held the line on the position that only sheep’s-milk cheese was proper for the context (what with sheep having a rather different symbolic valence in the Gospel narratives than cows or goats do …) is perhaps an interesting question.
“invitation to schism”
🙁
I heard (from an ex-member) of an independent church that literally split over the issue of communion wine, though not for oenophile reasons but over whether it should be alcoholic. At communion, the Abstainers sat on one side of the aisle, and the Imbibers on the other.
I gather that eventually this compromise proved insufficient for the diehards, and the congregations separated altogether.
When I was in Nigeria, the local ECWA church used “Malta” instead of communion wine. This is a sort of non-alcoholic version of Guinness, and may quite possibly be the most unpleasant thing I have ever drunk more than once.
Plenty of American fundies insist on hilariously anachronistic grape juice.
In Ugaritic, the verb lḥm just means “eat”.
I suppose that you actually could make an argument for using beer instead of wine in communion in the savanna zone of West Africa, beer being the familiar local alcoholic drink and wine being pretty much unknown traditionally (and prohibitively expensive nowadays, too.) Nearest thing culturally. Millet porridge instead of bread, presumably, too. Bread and wine certainly do bring home the alienness of Christianity to that part of the world. For at least some locals, that’s a feature rather than a bug, though.
There is a stratum of folklore, “semi-miraculous stories associated with church/religion”. Not stories about serious miracles: the teller of this particular story is an energetic fighter with/critic of what they call “magism”, that is certain forms of folk religion**. So the guy, as a paraecclesiarch, was helping a priest to choose appropriate wine for the Eucharist. The priest drank a gulp from this bottle then that bottle than… and so on, and of course he did Not spate out anything. I think at that point the wine was already considered not quite just “wine”.*
And the miraculous detail was that he was not getting drunk.
(as a contrast the Old Irish story about a sidhe woman – a Christian sidhe woman by the way – who was repeating Christ’s miracles using her magical powers: she turned water into [what it was that the Old Irish drank – I’m not sure if it was whiskey] and everyone got drunk)
*So maybe I simplified it and he did not just “tried” it but also drank everything that was not needed?
** Somehow, while in Russian Christianity grumbling at magism is what certain progressive and educated believers do, in Islam it is the job of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – educated, but hardly progressive.
The Wiktionary page on Arabic لحم is a right old mess. It falsely states that the Ethiopic lahm means “food” (while also blithely ignoring the consonant mismatch) and makes up an imaginary proto-Afro-Asiatic form “food” for the Arabic to be derived from.
I was looking at it to see if the “bread” meaning is actually seen anywhere outside NW Semitic. Given the Ugaritic verb, I wonder if the “bread” sense is actually just a NW thing? If it’s only one subbranch of the tree, then Arabic seems to have just as good a claim to preserving an original sense. The NW forms would not be independent innovations, but all inherited from proto-NW.
Plenty of American fundies insist on hilariously anachronistic grape juice.
I grew up in such a church. It was fun to watch strict literalists go into contortions over it.
I also believed as a small Sunday-school boy that in Bible times, when they made you a king they poured oil on your head to annoy you. Made perfect sense to me.
From the cutting room floor. This is from an entry in Lindsay‘s Pentecontaglossal Paternoster. Since it hasn’t been digitized, it wouldn’t have worked to give a snippet and link to the rest.
These language notes are quite miscellaneous. The Chinese one talks about magnets.
@RogerC:
I once read an earnest tract dedicated to showing that Jesus turned the water into non-alcoholic wine at Cana. (That’s why everybody remarked that it was better than the wine served at the beginning, you see. It’s all there in the text once you know …)
@MMcM:
Old Welsh orthography basically “solved” the problem by not marking the mutations at all. Presumably that is what is being confusedly alluded to.
An actual Welsh speaker, of course, knows where and which mutations occur. and so can unpick them in order to look unfamiliar words up in the dictionary, There are a few cases where different initials have same mutation, so you may guess wrong the first time. It’s not a big problem in practice.
Admittedly it’s a nuisance for a learner. Should we revise our orthography for the benefit of the English learner? Couldn’t the English put their own house in order first?
Jesus turned the water into non-alcoholic wine at Cana
If he was able to produce a non-alcoholic wine that was actually palatable, that would truly have been a miracle of the highest order.
Good point.
In fact, that proves it must have been non-alcoholic. John’s whole point is evidently that the wedding guests praised the wine despite it being non-alcoholic!
I’ve been so blind …
When I google for “Semitic” I get WP: Semitic people.
Then maps.
Then questions.
(And only the third link if I scroll it down is “WP:Semitic” beginning with “Semitic most commonly refers to the Semitic languages…“)
So I click Semitic people in hope to click “languages” there.
Не тут-то было!
“Semitic people or Semites is an obsolete term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group[2][3][4][5] associated with people of the Middle East, including Arabs, Jews, Akkadians, and Phoenicians.”
And a warning that “ancient groups who spoke Semitic languages,” are now called “ancient Semitic-speaking peoples.”
Oh and in WP:Semitic,
– Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples
– Semitic people, an obsolete term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group who speak or spoke the Semitic languages
____
Why all these complaints (same for Meinhof and Co): yes, I understand, there is racism and there is anti-semitism and what not. I don’t understand why people start doing everything через жопу when they feel the need to comment on racism, anti-semitism and what not. If these things should be countered, doing everything other than через жопу becomes even more important…
The choice of non-wine over wine is not a schism (by definition it’s not over what sort of wine to use …), it’s an extremely grave heresy, one that gives greater weight to crackpot 19th century moralistic reformism than to the Gospel. I guess the only silver lining is that it seems only to exist among those who don’t understand the Eucharist in the first place so they don’t mistakenly think they are consuming the Blood of Christ in any sense other than perhaps the merely and trivially symbolic. You might as well drink Tang and eat potato chips.
There are of course ancient and sometimes bitter disputes over whether the bread to use should be leavened or unleavened, which is perhaps one thing that makes the lack of a comparably ancient divide over what sort of wine to use striking.
One might note that the Irish liked their beer quite a bit and St. Brigid famously had the charism of being able to miraculously turn water into beer (not merely as a conjuring stunt, but for pious purposes, of course), yet Irish churchmen stuck to wine when confecting the Bl. Sacrament.
The WP page on Semitic languages doesn’t seem all that coherent. It’s rather as if the page on Romance languages was really all about Latin. All that comparative stuff is fine, but belongs on its own separate page.
There should be much more about the modern Semitic languages, and their amazing diversity. Instead, you get things like this: “All Semitic languages show two quite distinct styles of morphology used for conjugating verbs. ” (They mean, prefix and suffix conjugations.) Oh, no they don’t … the Neo-Aramaic languages don’t, for example (except for modern Mandaic.)
Given that the most widely spoken Semitic language after Arabic is actually Amharic, presenting Arabic as the typical Semitic language is pretty misleading. They need to get clear on the difference between historical linguistics and describing a contemporary language family.
I think there has been a fair bit of politically motivated editing of the various WP articles on Semitic languages, drasvi. (At one point the Arabic one had an astonishingly mealy-mouthed statement to the effect that “some” scholars held that it was related to Hebrew.) I think adopting more passive approach to things like the racist misuse of the term “Semitic” would probably lead to trouble. You yourself are admirably free of racism, but (alas) not everyone is like you.
OK, I didn’t read Kogan thoroughly enough. Kogan, Genealogical Classification of Semitic: the Lexical Isoglosses, p. 193, reads, “PCS *laḥm- ‘food’ is probably derived from the verbal root *lḥm ‘to eat, to taste,’ attested in Akk. lêmu ‘to take food or drink’ (CAD L 126, AHw. 543), Ugr. lḥm ‘to eat’ (DUL 495) and Hbr. lḥm ‘to eat, to taste’ (HALOT 454).” A footnote adds, “For Fronzaroli (1972:616), *laḥm- is a PS archaism lost in Akkadian.” I don’t understand why that connection is omitted from the online SED, which contains both meanings as separate roots.
(The Akkadian references are the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, and von Soden’s Akkadisches Handwörterbuch.)
через жопу
ass-backwards (не так, как надо) ?
@Y:
Looks pretty convincing. “Food” it is, then.
Though naturally I am immediately reminded of Kusaal lɛm “taste”, proto-Oti-Volta *lèm- … presumably related in some fashion to POV *lém-fʊ́ “tongue”, which seems to go back all the way to proto-Volta-Congo, though I am wary of assuming too much with such suspiciously phonaesthetic-looking words. The ghost of Merritt Ruhlen stirs ominously once again …
ass-backwards (не так, как надо) ?
I believe so, but I’ll await drasvi’s verdict.
There are presumably few people who try to learn Welsh without knowing English first, but if you mean to imply that mutations only confuse native English speakers, I am doubtful.
Of course, the Gaelic solution of having a special letter used only to mark changes makes it easier to look things up in the dictionary, but harder to pronounce them – in the sense that there is no real reason (for example) why ‘bh’ should make a ‘v’ sound, except that a changed ‘b’ does make a ‘v’ sound and the ‘h’ just signals ‘make the appropriate change for this letter’. I think.
I am suddenly confused by the fact that ‘ph’ makes an ‘f’ sound both in Gaelic and in (Greek words in) English.
To be exact, ph is /f/ in any English word, as long as it stays within a morpheme (so not hophead). Most ph words are Greek, but e.g. phish and philibeg are not.
Although philibeg is Gaelic (although spelt with an f there!) and phish is deliberately odd – /f/ in English is not normally ph.
But what I was really wondering about was the connection between the p and f sounds – it’s not just a borrowing of an English spelling convention, because the p sound really does change to an f sound in something like piuthar/a phiuthar.
It turns out that Welsh also changes m and b into v (despite writing it as f) – but none of the other changes seem to match up.
The lenition of voiced stops actually did match in Old Welsh and Old Irish, but Welsh has kept ð unchanged and lost ɣ, while the two fell together as ɣ in Irish.
The lenition of unvoiced stops was different all along, of course: voiced in Welsh, fricativised in Irish.
Old Welsh orthography just ignored lenition, including word-internally. Irish scribes adopted the Brit conventions, which is how Old Irish ended up with its wonderful rococo spelling conventions, like cét “hundred” with t for [d].
Middle Welsh orthography mostly wrote lenition word-internally, but generally not initially or finally. You could make a goodish argument that the change from Old Welsh to (early) Middle Welsh was actually largely a matter of new spelling conventions. There was a period when scribes knew both sets of conventions, but they quite often made mistakes in transposing to the new one. Sometimes you can actually deduce that a Middle Welsh text was based on an Old Welsh original from the mistakes.
And now Gaelic has ceud with d pronounced as t…
‘things like the racist misuse of the term “Semitic” would’
@DE, do you mean “Ethiopian vs other (black) African” kind of racism – one that treats Semites as more or less comparable to Europeans?
(I can’t seriously think of something like “I better let my Aryan dautgher marry the first Afghan guy or gal she meets on the street than racially inferiour Maltese scum!” )
The way they do it in WP is somewhat farcical. And inconvenient.
I’m definitely not against anti-rasist propaganda (by “propaganda” I mean e.g. UEFA anti-racism campaign etc., not a swear word “politicised bullshit pretending to be news”) and though I don’t think scientific truth can make us morally better, I am still all for careful use of such classifications.
But surely this second thing (careful use) can be done in ways that I don’t find farcical:-(
The first thing too, but it usually IS done in ways I don’t find so:)
I mean, as in “antisemitic” (i.e. hatred of Jews on “racial” grounds.)
As part of the complexity of language, the word “antisemitic” is not itself antisemitic; but “Semitic” as a label for a group of people most certainly is. It’s used in that way nowadays pretty much exclusively by Jew-haters.
You may say that that’s irrational, and I would agree. But it’s a fact about modern English usage however we feel about it. It may be different in Russian, though I suspect not.
The only neutral use of the word in English is now to describe the language group – which of course largely comprises languages spoken by people who have never been the target of antisemitism (though often enough targeted by other forms of bigotry) and spoken by some people who are themselves highly antisemitic.
Secondarily, I myself object to the term “Semitic” to describe any group of people anyway, on the grounds of it being devoid of any genuine scientific content, right up there with “Hamitic” and “Japhetic.” But that is a minor issue, comparatively.
I get cross whenever people confuse language and genetics, and plan on continuing to do so. There are no “Bantu races.” There are no “Indo-European peoples.” America has millions of exclusively Indo-European speakers whose forebears mainly came from Africa. It annoys me that it is even necessary to say this nowadays. By all means let people play at correlating ancient gene flows with hypothesised language history: so long as they stay the hell out of politics.
I mean, as in “antisemitic” (i.e. hatred of Jews on “racial” grounds.)
@DE, ah. But this is not really hatred of Semites.
The initial version of my comment was:
“There is “Semitic” as in “anti-Semitic” where it means “Jewish”. This (mis)use is not specifically racist, I encounter it in the word “anti-Semitic” much more often.
And there is anti-Semitism (directed at Jews) and Islamopoby.
Semites are also sometimes mentioned in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict (the idea is that maybe they should stop fighting and remember that both are Semites) and when Jewishness is discussed – both by normal people and by anti-Semites.
But I don’t know anyone (literally) who has any specific sentiment towards Semitic peoples. Some Arabic speakers are curious about similarity of Arabic and Amharic, that’s all. ”
Then I thouht that you mean “Ethiopians vs. other Africans” and deleted it. I post it again because for me it is different. Maybe because its use in Russian is different, I don’t know.
I do hear this word in the context of Jews in Russian but not from anti-Semites. Just from anyone who wants to discuss their pre-European (also pre-Bukharan, etc.) cultural connections or historical connections (holistically but wihtout racist overtones). Russian anti-Semites must use it too because why not – but I can’t remember hearing it from them.
Or maybe they even have a reason to avoid it (e.g. because Semites also include our allies the Arabs:)).
Maybe it is different in English.
But:
Does it contribute into the sentiment anyhow?
Do they hate Jews “because” those are racially alien and do they think Jews are racially alien “because” they’re “like Arabs and Ethiopians” and not just because they’re “Jews’?
@jen
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenition
“An example of historical lenition in the Germanic languages is evidenced by Latin-English cognates such as pater, tenuis, cornu vs. father, thin, horn. ”
I think this is also happened with PIE p in Proto-Celtic (the Middle Irish p is a later introduction).
So f may be a natural lenition pathway for p, maybe especially if you realise the p without bringing the lips together and then apart.
re ceud, am faclair beag only seems to have distinct initial t, even port and alt are realised as d, and there are some doublets where the (non-initial) consonant can appear as either t or d.
I think if I heard it from one (the word “Semites” from an anti-Semite) I would have assumed that she simply is doing same thing as other users of the word…
Then if from this she managed to derive some flaw in Jews, I’d again think that that’s because Jews must be somehow flawed and any fact about them must somehow confirm it. Unless of course I have a reason to think she (assuming she’s Christian) is also hostile to Christian Arabs.
And if she speaks about “Semitic race” – even then I will just think “racists love books from 19th century and language used there”.
But it’s just langauge from me.
I don’t think we achieve anything by replacing one word with another.
All of this because all anti-Semites I know are focused on Jews. Anti-Semitism – yes, Islamophoby – yes, but no sing of hatred to any sort of “Semitic race”.
“I better let my Aryan dautgher marry the first Afghan guy”
Once I was googling for a photo in a Russian geographical magazine and found it … on a forum of lovers of Nazi-style racial theory.
One of them particularly memorable: he wrote he is “Baltic” and thus emotionally unstable but he married a German woman and their daughter is perfectly “Nordic” and thanks God there are no signs of emotional instability.
“Character [i.e. personality]: Nordic” was a source of many jokes in USSR when the series about SS-Standartenfüher Stierlitz (form his personal file) so I suppose this then-little blonde girl thinks with the voice* of the guy who voiced Stierlitz’s thoughs and seldom awards the world with a strained smile (my apologies to Trond and other geographically nordic people here, I don’t think so about them).
*in her head or on another plane of reality. Or maybe a parallel universe where she’s a popular character of some series …I don’t know.
If you see a character in a prewar British source described as having “Semitic” features, it means that the amiable author wants you to think he looks stereotypically Jewish. Not Arab (and certainly not Elamite, even though Elam was a son of Shem.) It’s not always actually meant as a slur, though it can be hard to be sure in works from an age where low-level antisemitism was just a sort of background radiation. You see it even in George Orwell, though he is honest about its irrationality, at least, and clearly working his own way out of it even then.
Nowadays, if a Brit says “Semitic”, of a person, they mean “Jew.” If they claim that “really” it means Arabs too (such people have rarely heard of any other “Semites”) they’re doing the extreme-right obfuscation thing. It means nothing. They almost certainly hate Arabs too, but they still actually mean “Jew” when they say “Semite.”
They don’t hate Jews because they think they are related to Arabs or Ethiopians (hardly any of them would actually know that many Ethiopians speak “Semitic” languages, and they hate Ethiopians for being black, not “Semitic.”) They hate Jews for all the drearily familiar reasons that European gentiles have been hating Jews for two millennia. They certainly imagine that Jews are a “different race”; the old “theological” reasons for hating Jews don’t have much traction these days, unless you’re Mel Gibson.
@DE, thanks!
I know “Semites” in the sense “Jews” (as in “anti-Semites”) and maybe this prewar usage is comparable to our “Slavic features” which means “Russian, or at least not Caucasian/Central Asian or otherwise ‘black’ anyway!” but is thought to be less direct.
Here it is not a slur of course : it is how Russians write about Russians when trying to sound more acceptable for a context where discrimination based on ethnicity is considered not quite appropriate.
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But is there a reason to fight against this word? If it is just “Jews” and all implied racism if any (I think racist component is possible but not necessary) is anti-Jewish racism….
Of course we may dislike it (just as any other element of the langauge of anti-Semites) and Jews may also find it offensive – but I thought you mean that there is some grand racial theory (about Ethiopians, Arabs etc.) that somehow contributes into anti-Jewish ideas.
So f may be a natural lenition pathway for p
Absolutely. You see it in Arabic and in Classical Ethiopic, which have f throughout for proto-Semitic *p; and many West African languages have f and no *p, including Hausa, Manding and Yoruba (the written p in Yoruba actually represents /k͡p/.)
The Oti-Volta language Nawdm likewise has f throughout for proto-Oti-Voilta *p, e.g. fɔ́gá “wife” = Yom pɔ̄ɣā; fúúgú “belly” = Gulmancema pùògū.
Per n-grams, “Semitic gentleman” was slightly in vogue in the 1900s in British English, for a moment as much as “Hebrew gentleman”, which by then was far past its Victorian heyday. “Hebrew” was used on both sides of the Atlantic; “Semitic” only in the UK.
What you told also explains those articles in WP. I did not know that anyone can potentially find “Semites” offensive…
___
Still the concept is similar to “Celts” and “Berbers”.
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I also was confused because Semites were discussed as a race in 19th century.
And I think for many of those who wrote about it (racists and not) the Bedouins would be pure proto-Semites, not Jews. Jews (1) don’t all “have same face” (2) more likely to have undergone mixing in historical times, based on documented history.
“Semitic” only in the UK
Huh. Wonder why that was?
I think Dickens describes a boy as being of the “Hebrew persuasion” somewhere, which was another common sniggery way of saying “Jewish.”
Dickens, of course, famously got better and made amends in Our Mutual Friend (though Mr Riah is a bit over the top in his all-round saintliness, you can’t say Dickens wasn’t at least trying.)
And back to the approach to the racist misuse: if “misuse” is reserving it for Jews, then I’m not sure how warning me against applying it to Akkadian speakers (and they did not even consider Arabs and Ethiopians) helps.
I thought you mean that there is some grand racial theory (about Ethiopians, Arabs etc.) that somehow contributes into anti-Jewish ideas.
i would say there absolutely is, as DE mentioned earlier: the bible-as-race-science classification of peoples into “hamitic” (black, cursèd, and inferior), “semitic” (christ-killers and their cousins – including arabs and sometimes people from the horn of africa), and “japhet[hit]ic” (white folks), which is the direct source of these words as linguistic terminology.
that’s also the source out of which the mid-19thC anti-jewish political movement named itself “antisemitic”. this was an innovative movement, that transformed existing forms of european christian anti-jewish bigotry into something new, closely articulated to the newly devised integral nationalist ideologies. i feel quite strongly that we should reserve “antisemitism” for that specific ideology: letting it become a synonym for “anti-jewish” is an active obstacle to combatting that ideology’s ongoing presence and influence, because it allows it to be treated as a matter of either individual psychology or structural social dynamics, rather than a political ideology to be addressed as such.
I’m not sure how warning me against applying it to Akkadian speakers (and they did not even consider Arabs and Ethiopians) helps
The language is Semitic. There are no “Semitic peoples.” Calling the Akkadians “Semites” is not racist (and perfectly respectable sources actually do); but it’s incoherent and unscientific (if you ask me. Few do.)
The term “Semitic” for the language group is pretty unsatisfactory itself. In Genesis, Shem is the ancestor of the Hebrews, Aramaeans and Assyrians, but also of the Elamites, and very much not the ancestor of the Canaanites, who can thus be handily dispossessed despite the fact that they ended up speaking languages every bit as much “Semitic” as the Hebrews and rather more so than the Elamites.
Far too late to do anything about it now, though.
“Bantu” is also partly skunked by the Apartheid misuse of the term as “racial” category, but again there’s no real help for it now. At least the term has an actual sensible rationale of its own.
i feel quite strongly that we should reserve “antisemitism” for that specific ideology: letting it become a synonym for “anti-jewish” is an active obstacle to combatting that ideology’s ongoing presence and influence, because it allows it to be treated as a matter of either individual psychology or structural social dynamics, rather than a political ideology to be addressed as such
Interesting. I’m all for bashing ethnonationalism, and certainly agree that we’re up against an ideology, and that treating it as a sort of individual psychopathology is buying into the neoliberal every-man-is-an-island story.
But surely it still is specifically anti-Jewish?
You evidently know more (and have thought more) about this than me, though. What difference does it make in what we should actually be doing?
no sing of hatred to any sort of “Semitic race”.
I remember reading a travelogue by Hilaire Belloc, recounting a trip through North Africa, in which he is copiously and unmistakably anti-Semitic against Phoenicians. I was expecting him to extend it to Arabs as well, but as it happened he ended up finding a different way to be racist against them; maybe he felt it would be boring to repeat the same stereotypes for two different ethnicities in the same book.
Now I think about it, though, Ernest Renan is probably the poster child for academic anti-Semitism in the sense of an animus against speakers of Semitic languages in general. It’s an unusual position, especially today, but it is attested.
A Wikipedia page on Renan, which reads more like an essay, states (if I can make heads or tails of it) that Renan believed in Semitic race, but didn’t include European Jews in it (they were Khazars for him). Which makes him a very interesting sort of anti-Semite. The aforementioned Wiki page has a quote that can be plagiarized by JD Vance (google him, or better not) without anyone noticing: “The tolerated alien can be useful to a country, but only on condition that the country does not allow itself to be invaded by him. It is not fair to claim family rights in a house which one has not built, like those birds which come and take up their quarters in a nest which does not belong to them, or like the crustaceans which steal the shell of another species.”
@DE:
absolutely, Antisemitism (i’m capitalizing to mark it as a proper name) is quite specifically anti-jewish!
but it and other forms of anti-jewish bigotry operate differently from each other, and need to be combatted differently. i’ll try to be briefish, and necessarily incomplete, because organizing strategy is a bit more of a digression than usual. i also can’t claim true expertise: my larger framing is somewhat original, but the tactical side is drawn from friends directly involved in street-level antifascist work, and histories of the successful past militant antifascist campaigns of the 1980s whose work we’re now having to re-do (AFA in the u.k., ARA in the u.s., etc).
traditional christian anti-jewishness, to the extent it still exists as a disentangleable thing, can be dismantled in its immediate forms by/through a specific set of institutional structures – christian denominations and churches – because it’s a matter of what happens in educational, liturgical, and theological spaces under their direct control. but, importantly, in the u.s. and europe (and other places, in differently-inflected ways), fully addressing it has to include the larger societal transformations required to deal with the very real structural force of christian supremacism. but while traditional christian anti-jewishness was central to that force’s emergence and to its operation in the past, its primary targets have for quite a few decades been muslims, not jews, which means it can’t be successfully dealt with through a narrow focus on anti-jewishness.
Antisemitism, on the other hand, can’t be effectively approached in those ways. it’s not the province of a single field of institutions, and while it’s certainly tied to and reinforced by christian supremacism and other structural forces, they pre-existed it by centuries and it is not central to them. because it is a political movement and ideology, addressing it starts with de-platforming its ideologues and the organizations they’re part of (emphatically including physical confrontation whenever it makes tactical sense), and actively counter-propagandizing against its messages and structures of thinking*. ridicule, marginalization, and critical/historical education (in catchy and easily graspable forms) all aimed at making it (and its ideologues and their organizations) immediately discrediting to be associated with, are as i see it some of the key elements, alongside continuous disruption.
unlike with traditional christian anti-jewishness, with Antisemitism there’s no positive role for corrective action by the organizations involved in spreading it; that, we know from experience, just gives its ideologues opportunities to rephrase their ideology in subtler forms. similarly, there isn’t a useful public role for turncoats – they can be invaluable sources of information to guide deplatforming and disruption, and their testimonies can be useful in counter-propaganda, but their active presence ends up publicizing their former commitments at least as much as their new ones.
instead of any of this, the individual-psychological model, as well as constantly centering “reformed” bigots (and often using their advice to shape its strategies), pursues a “cure” in ways that feed directly into Antisemitic structures of thinking, which have consistently presented the ideology as “the suppressed truth”, making efforts to depict it as an individual’s irrational or immoral thinking serve to reinforce a commitment to it. structural approaches tend to say there’s no point focusing on the actual people and organizations spreading the ideology, and so in practice allow it to proliferate. blends of the two, like the one spread widely in the u.s. NGO sphere by the scientology-split-off Reevaluation Counseling cult’s National Coalition Building Institute front, manage to follow both dead-end paths at once.
.
* particularly, to my mind, the core “anti-social child-killing conspiracy” package whose earlier history norman cohn traces in Europe’s Inner Demons. his focus is on its trajectory from a slander campaign used against rival roman political factions, through its use against rival christian denominations, to its wider circulation as the motor of the witch craze (occasionally targeting jews and roma along the way), but he nods at its quite recent deployment against jews (i can’t remember if he names the decisive turning point: the adaptation of a eugène sue villain monologue, after several intermediate steps, into the Protocols of the Elders of Zion). currently, the package is mainly used to target queer and trans folks (and, innovatively, arabs), although the parts of the u.s. right who don’t combine zionism with philosemitism are making a solid play for putting jews back on the list.
Thanks, rozele. That’s very helpful.
Still the concept is similar to “Celts” and “Berbers”
I’m here to confirm that there is indeed no “Celtic race” (and never was.)
I should know, what with not-belonging to the non-race myself. Cymru am byth! A’r Wladfa hefyd! (as the land of my fathers … some of them, anyhow.)
(Most of the genetic heritage of the English dates from before the Anglo-Saxon invasions. If there actually were any Celtic races, the English would have a better claim to belong to one than most. They’re just our cousins who didn’t pick up Welsh from their mothers.)
By the time Antisemitismus came into being in the later 19th century as a new self-conscious thing, the older Biblical taxonomy of Semite/Hamite/Japhethite as the highest-level division of mankind into subgroups had been abandoned by the progressive and scientifically-minded sorts of folks who became the first self-designated Antisemites. The new and non-Biblical high-level division was, at a minimum, Caucasoid/Negroid/Mongoloid, with some but not all taxonomizers using “Semite” as the label for one subset of Caucasoid. But there seems to have been considerable diversity of views as to just how many subsets of the Caucasoid group there were and where the boundaries between them lay, separate and apart from what labels should be used for them. It’s rather similar to the problem of how many “languages” an extensive dialect continuum should be partitioned into.
@jwb
You are being kind. The ultimate guarantors of hate are not theoreticians but very dynamic tactical thinkers. The theoreticians are ignored by the practitioners.
I don’t know. Pseudoscientific racism was ideologically important to the Nazis; and certainly modern far-right hatemongers treasure their “race scientist” collaborators. It seems to be very important to them to believe that non-racist “whites” are actually denying straightforward scientific “fact”, either because they are dupes or for sinister conspiratorial reasons. They, on the other hand, have taken the Red Pill and see reality clearly.
Even fascists share the general human desire to believe that what they are doing is morally right. Trump seems to be genuinely indifferent to questions of right and wrong, but I don’t think he is actually typical.
Lameen, oh, yes, Renan!
Though I don’t know if it is honest revulsion to Semitic cultures and individuals or just some combination of
(a) attempts to develop a theory of the fashionable concept of race
(b) a history of monotheism
with (c) generalised belief that “we” are the best, no matter how exactly we split humanity to produce “we” and “them”.
And of coruse shamelessness of French intellectuals of the time in expressing this (c).
I mean, I can be against my daughers’s marriage to one of “them”, or I can feel mistrust to individual them, or I can take them collectively as a “theat” – we know all these things as anti-… and …phoby.
(I even say that most Russians are Islamophobes in a different sense: we learn about “Muslim conquest” and various facts about excessive strictness of certain versions of Islam and as result there are simply no good associations (other than 1001 nights or – for me – names of stars. I like stars:) And well, Muslim/Arab golden age is known here). I keep reiterating it because this component is usually ignored. The 1001 nights point has to do with my disagreement with anti-Orienalism.
But it is a different story.)
Nothing of this follows from the belief that we’re the best, though – and even from theorising to explain why it is so. If there is more to it, there must be some traces in his books.
PS actually there are prozelithising believers in we-re-the-best (we’re the best, join us!)
Though I don’t know if it is honest revulsion to Semitic cultures
Well, given that “Semitic” cultures have nurtured child-sacrificing Carthaginians (seems like they really did), warrior Jihadis*, gentle Sufi mystics, Talmudic scholars, proudly atheist kibbutzniks, Maltese tour guides, African subsistence farmers, Syriac Christian writers of profound meditative hymns, Cordoban poets, ground-breaking grammarians and the Saatchi brothers, I think any “general revulsion to Semitic culture” can only really be parsed as a hatred of humanity in general.
* Usman ɗan Fodiyo was in fact a Sufi scholar, though not, I think, exactly a mystic (he had a more practical outlook.) Life is complicated.
Trump seems to be genuinely indifferent to questions of right and wrong, but I don’t think he is actually typical.
I can’t agree with you here. If by “questions of right and wrong” you mean “abstract discourse about right and wrong”, then Trump and a great many people are indifferent to them. I get the impression that in the USA and elsewhere these great many people no longer see much of a connection between what someone nominally espouses and what they will actually do. They think Trump is merely putting on a show, and is not really an unhinged dumb-ass.
I can be against my daughers’s marriage to one of “them”
From one of my favorite novels: “I have nothing against women, but I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one.” [Don’t Point That Thing At Me]
“a trip through North Africa” – I think some French in colonial times could have disliked “Arabs” because Berbers are “local”, once Roman and often once Christian people and “Arabs” are Banu Hilal (wild hordes of invaders from alien Arabia) and before that the Muslim army.
It is not difficult to construct the system “Berbers good, Arabs bad”.
P.S. Stu, brilliant.
Stu, brilliant
Kyril Bonfiglioli is indeed worth reading. I second the recommendation.
“Readers are pretty much evenly divided between those who relish the books’ unflinching, un-PC meanness, and those who are appalled” says WP.
I can only say that the latter need to work on their appalledness tolerance, and perhaps move out of Tunbridge Wells while there is yet hope for them.
(Also, “unflinching, un-PC meanness” is a ludicrous misrepresentation of the books. You might as well say it of The Importance of Being Earnest. Though there is a bit more sex and violence …)
“Maltese tour guides”
Those are the worst. Must be the worst. Never met one. (I rememeber somewhere in Lombroso’s writings some serious flaw was attributed to some of.. Oh, I forgot, maybe those were Sicilians and not the Maltese? Based on Arab substratum but again I may have misrememebered)
Maybe Renan had a bad experience with a Maltese tour guide, and then generalised unwisely?
#NotAllMalteseTourGuides
Your more scientifically-minded 19th-to-early-20th-century taxonomizers were well aware that due to historical contingency language currently spoken did not always track actual blood ancestry. In order to determine who was or wasn’t a “Semite” in the racial sense you needed to approach the matter scientifically and measure their skulls rather than simply note whether the language they happened to speak was or wasn’t a Semitic one.
DE, is “Semites” worse than other such labels and concepts?
You object to “Celtic race”. But we are not talking about the word “race”, we’re talking about “Semites” – the label and the concept. WP uses “…people” vs. “…peopleS” but tha’ts just how WP tells bad “Semites” from good “Semites” (not to be confused with Semites). Renan has “les peuples sémitiques” alongside with “la race sémitique” and “les Sémites” (De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civilisation)
@JWB:
True, true.
(The villain of one of John Buchan’s really rather good Richard Hannay novels is repeatedly described as having an “appallingly round head.” And he has an unEnglish name. I think we all know what to make of that.)
Renan has “les peuples sémitiques”
There aren’t any. Renan had been checking under his bed every night for nothing.
Interesting that Renan was from Brittany. I’d forgotten that. Though not Breton-speaking.
we’re talking about “Semites” – the label and the concept.
But the concept is wrong. The term can only be meaningfully applied to languages, as DE has been explaining.
It’s been said (? I don’t know by whom but it seems plausible) that of all Rome’s conquests it was the Jews who gave them the most persistent grief — and that this was a late stage of a struggle going back before Carthage between North and South Mediterranean cultures.
Somebody said something once about history being a nightmare from which we are all trying to wake . . .
@jack: Somebody said something once about history being a nightmare from which we are all trying to wake . . .
It was the character Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses.
I have never taken that utterance to be as ominous and profound as you seem to do (and others as well). Ulysses is only a novel, the reader is free to think of Dedalus as an overwrought pussy.
I’m not convinced that there actually was any such great chasm between North and South Mediterranean cultures.
The Jews, for example, had already been profoundly affected by Hellenistic culture long before the Romans stuck their noses in. And there were plenty of Jews by the second century BCE who already needed to have their scriptures in Greek. A lot of this supposed culture clash had been taking place withiin Judaism for centuries. It was very far from exotic “oriental” Jews against “occidental” Romans. (Come to that; the Romans themselves were pretty damn exotic from our standpoint – a fact systematically downplayed in traditional “classical education.” They really weren’t much like us at all.)
Carthage was organised as an imperial oligarchic state remarkably like Rome in many ways. And it’s a very clear instance of history being written by the (genocidal) victors, who had every motive to represent the losers as incomprehensibly Other. (I don’t want to over-egg the pudding: apparently the archaeological evidence is clear that the Carthaginians really did practice systematic child sacrifice, for example. But Carthage didn’t die of natural causes. It was murdered.)
the reader is free to think of Dedalus as an overwrought pussy
I think there is abundant evidence that Joyce actually intended just that. Bloom, foolish as he is in many ways, is largely presented as much more grounded and sensible than Stephen. Stephen is very clever indeed, overwrought by recent bereavement, but above all young. Stephen, after all, is only Telemachus. It’s Bloom who is Ulysses.
“But the concept is wrong.”
But I did not ask whether it is wrong:/
I asked if it is worse than other names and concepts on which we rely all the time, from (modern) “Russians” to “Indo-Europeans” or merely one more point on the spectrum only different from others in dating.
WP says that “Mande languages” are spoken by “Mandé peoples” and this is a system. This is how WP is organised.
Yes. It’s a bad habit. Lots of languages are spoken as L1 by more than one (self proclaimed) ethnic group (Hausa is a familiar one in West Africa), and there are ethnic groups (identified as such by themselves) with more than one L1. The exotic Welsh, who live on an inhospitable island off the remotest fringes of Eurasia, are an example (and their women wear funny hats, too.)
It’s not mere political correctness to say “X-speaking people” rather than “X people.” It’s a question of accuracy.
The unthinking equation of race and language is an artefact of modern ideological ethnonationalism. Even if that ideology had been entirely politically benign, it would still be objectionable on purely scientific grounds.
In the context of West African groups like the “Mande peoples”, the usage very often reflects colonial lumping together of disparate groups for administrative convenience. Colonial officials rarely cared much about the actual ethic affiliations of the people they ruled. Postcolonial administrations have very often simply carried the colonial usages over.
None of the ethnic groups that now speak one of the Songhay languages referred to themselves or their languages as “Songhay” traditionally. (It’s an old clan name, belonging to the rulers of the Songhay empire. It’s as if the Brits called themselves the “Windsors.”)
@de
These usages are not per se wrong, and they can avoid having to either have a million equivalents for “Turkish coffee” or qualify something to death, e.g., the Latin language or Roman citizens. “Roman citizen” was a legal term, but I don’t think Latin or romaoi was. Probably there was no reason to have an overarching name for the Songhay languages for speakers until organised trade or a state forced them to come up with one or use one imposed by outsiders.
Which reminds me that in Halkomelem, the word for “white person” is borrowed from “King George.” (And to speak English is thus literally “to King-George.”)
@PP:
Yes, I wouldn’t at all want to imply that anyone talking about (say) “Mande peoples” is some sort of horrid colonialist racist for doing so. That is plainly simply untrue.
But I do think that it’s sloppy and potentially seriously misleading, and that such usages are not at all as neutral as might be thought. WP have got perfectly good reasons for avoiding them where feasible: objections to this arise from either not understanding the background as fully as one mighf (usually) or from far-right culture-war deliberate bad faith (much less often.) I would certainly not wish to mistake the former for the latter.
Stephen is very clever indeed, overwrought by recent bereavement, but above all young.
Yes, I wrote “pussy” only because it occurred to me before I had to rush off on an errand. Having invoked the muse of moderation, I will now write “overwrought young clever-clogs”.
I should say that Oti-Volta speakers happily coin language names from ethnonyms, and there is every reason to think that they have always done so – nothing to do with colonialism at all.
Mind you, I suspect that in translating these derived terms as “language names” and conceptually aligning them with our own ways of thinking about language, we are subtly distorting the originals.
For example, the Toende Kusaasi speak Kusaal, pretty much by definition, and the Nabdema speak Nabit, again pretty much by definition. But to me as an outsider, Toende Kusaal actually looks closer to Nabit than to Agolle Kusaal. But the Toende Kusaasi don’t speak Nabit: that would be absurd. Contradiction in terms, even.
The Yansi seem to be of Dyula origin, but now actually speak Mooré. Doesn’t matter either way: in Kusaal, they speak Yaan (obviously.) Naturally, in Kusaal they do not speak Mɔɔl “Mooré”, because that is the language of the Mɔɔs “Mossi.”
All Nasaarnam “Europeans” speak Nasaal. However, the language does seem to contain a number of dialects between which mutual comprehension seems to be remarkably low.
“Yes. ”
Should I take it to mean “Yes, ‘Semites’ is worse than other such labels, like Mandé etc”?
Not sure if that “yes” is from me, but since you ask, yes it is worse, because “Semite” has acquired extremely pejorative overtones in the mouths of some extremely nasty and dangerous people.
“Mande peoples” is objectionable on grounds of scientific accuracy, but that is hardly in the same league. AFAIK, nobody is going round telling people that they are filthy Mande or saying that the Mande are running US foreign policy. The sort of Westerners who hate speakers of Mande languages use quite other abusive terms and would be unlikely even to know the word “Mande” or to care one bit about what it might mean.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=hYTQ7__NNDI
very nasal language, the european.
Sure is.
(Actually, the form of many English loans in Kusaal does rather suggest that they hear Brits as talking through their noses while stifling a cough: e.g. ma’antuoka “motorcar” …)
@JWB, @hat:
i’m not sure it’s possible to separate the linguistic usages from the race-science usages of the noah’s-sons labels for the peoples of western asia (including the european peninsulae) and africa, and the collapse (outside of specialist circles like ours) of language and putative-bloodline categories remains pretty complete. i haven’t dived deep into the usage histories, but my sense is that the past 200 years have seen a lot of terminology-shuffling in various sequences and fields – “japhetic” being replaced by “aryan”, “caucasian”, “indo-european”; “hamitic” by “negroid”, “bantu”, “sub-saharan”; “semitic”, interestingly, has been more stable – but without a lot of change to the underlying concepts themselves.
As I understand it:
1) we could (in principle) use some points of reference, turning the space of cultures and peoples into something like a geometrical space.
Instead people often discuss themselves as mixtures (half-this and half-that) and sometimes they speak so about cultures (x has been influenced by y and z) running into a paradox, because the sources of influences of course too experience influences.
Same for scientists like von Luschan (who I’d call anti-racist) – yes, everyone is mixed, but when the components in the mixture have been identified, those components must be mixtures too, right?
2) what language offers to us instead is classification. People love to classify.
So we put everyone in a box with her sort of people.
When people speak about themselves they often try to be more accurate, so maybe it is possible to do without classification.
3) nevertheless we classify. And all sorts of things stick to our classification. I don’t think that (much beloved by sceintists since 19th century) linguistical classifications are superiour to those based on the Bible.
– Linguists spoke about Aryans and Hitler fapped on those Aryans (influenced not only by linguistics, but other sciences too).
– Nationalism.
The correct quote:
#
Some of my best friends are women,’ I snapped, ‘though I certainly wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one of them.
#
DE, yes, from you and yes, I understand that those “yes” was about Mandé.
But I’m confused.
You were emphatically avoiding answering the question. Sometimes people do it, when “a journalist asks an inconvenient question to a politician”. LH commented on my question, but the question was whether “Semites” has the same flaw as all other lables – and his comment was that you “explained” (thanks captain) to me that “Semites” is a wrong concept. I don’t know what to do.
_____
So there are two problems as I understand:
1) bad people like this word
2) all labels are wrong to various extent (and this one is just as wrong as many others that we use).
But are not 1. and 2. very different?
Why solving 1 by inventing two concepts!? WP offers TWO.
Why solving 1 by speaking about the general problem with labels as if it is Semitic problem? Is not it better to discuss it as a problem with labels?
I’m also surprised that you speak of race.
I don’t associate “Semites” with a race any more than “Finns”. Maybe less.
But perhaps this is just because in Russia the word is used differently.
But are not 1. and 2. very different?
Yes, and therefore DE is saying “Semites” is worse (as I also said above).
I don’t associate “Semites” with a race any more than “Finns”.
But others do, as DE has been explaining. (Are you really not aware of that?)
“as I also said above” – no, you said it is wrong. Do you think it is more “wrong” (scientifically I think?) than other labels? There IS a problem with labels in general of course.
Yes.
I came across “Semitic race” in books from 19th cenutry. Also I came across claims that Tunisians are “a noble race” (sadly colonised by the French idiots who don’t know how to colonise properly) and what not. “Semitic race” is different than the improperly colonised noble race of Tunisians, but those theories that model history of humanity as history of “races” (perhaps holistically: races, to whom various cultrual achivement “belong”, and also somewhat similarly to models where they basic unit is a nation, class, etc.) – if they have any currency today, then not in science (and not in USSR/Russia outside of science). To learn about them I need to read antiquated books.
Also those theories treat all groups of people so, not just Semites, so they don’t create such an association for me, while “Semites” in the sense “Jews” is a synecdoche and is not about races anyway.
____
Those speakers of Semitic langauges who did not shift to Semitic realtively recently come from a certain region. All languages of this region known to us and spoken in Antiquity with the exception of Egyptian are Semitic. And similar enough (shifts {Akkadian and Hebrew} > Aramaic > Arabic).
The region is culturally interconnected (this DOES extend to Ethiopia – or did at least). And it is enormously (even enormously-enormously-enormously and not just enormously-enormously) important for the history of Europe and culturally influential.
In other words, their race (now outside of thsoe theories and less holistically) is hardly the most interesting thing about them, so why would we discuss it in USSR/Russia?
Also Finns for Russians (or blonde Russians for Arabs) are maybe even more unusual.
The people of what is now southern Iraq, arguably the most important area for the subsequent development of our civilisation, spoke Sumerian, which is not a Semitic language. This language became extinct four thousand years ago; it’s fairly clear that this was by language shift rather than population displacement. (Since then, they’ve gone through two more total language shifts; and they may well have spoken something else before Sumerian.)
It seems pretty likely that other non-Semitic languages in the Middle East suffered a similar fate. Hurrian, Kassite … the languages went away, but there is no reason to think the people went extinct.
The current speakers of Amharic (second-biggest Semitic language) pretty certainly mostly had Cushitic-speaking forebears.
Cultural influence, absolutely. But not racial. There is not now and never was a “Semitic race” to go with the Semitic languages.
Note that you do not need wholesale extensive migration of entire peoples to create a sweeping language shift. Britain is a case in point. I am not of a different “race” from my Saeson cousins. And most of their forebears never lived anywhere near Saxony. It’s just the name of the shop, dear …
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DE, but we are discussing “Semites”, not “Semitic race”.
I don’t understand why you and WP keep calling Arabs and Jews and Ethiopians so.
That is, you first call them so by replacing “Semites” with “Semitic race” and then object to yourself. I get it, there are some people who think that Semites are a race.
But that does not mean the label is not fully parallel to all other labels for peoples and groups of those – and that it does not have this meaning that has little to do with race. It is as if something is Wrong with {Arabs, Jews, …} so I can’t speak of them as I speak about everyone.
(I don’t even think these are “different meanings”, I think it is a name of a group of people, and some treat groups of peoples as “races” and others treat them differently)
Why should I in my usage
(1) follow idiots who I don’t even know – if we are not discussing Renan – and
(2) then solemnly change it becasue they’re idiots?
It is interesting that Arabic has been very successful at supplanting other Afroasiatic languages, and much less so at supplanting completely unrelated languages. I suspect that a lot of that is sheer historical accident though.
I really don’t follow you, drasvi. What is “Semite” supposed to refer to, if not a supposed “race”? I’ve never come across it in the sense “speaker of a Semitic language, irrespective of their biological origins.” I don’t think anybody has ever used the word that way in English. Everybody who has used the term at all assumed the language-equals-race equation (though, historically, not everone who used the term was actually antisemitic. Some were actually Jewish scholars.)
Is it really different in Russian?
Greek, Romance (while Berber is still spoken. In Tunisia there was massive shift in colonial times).
Arabic indeed is widely spoken in Maghreb but not in Iran (including Central Asia and Dagestan).
Modern Iran (including …)
@David E.: Let’s roll back the clock 3000 years. Sumerian is gone and (on the version of the disputed narrative we’re going to use for purposes of this question) no one across the Red Sea in Africa yet speaks a Semitic language. Semitic languages are spoken throughout a geographically contiguous area consisting of the Levant, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian peninsula. Bracketing the question of gene-pool similarity, did the Semitic-speaking peoples of that time constitute some sort of semi-coherent macro-group of ethnicities due to shared cultural practices etc etc such that it is *useful* in some contexts to speak of them as a group that one might (if not concerned about the word having been misused by Bad People) conveniently label “Semitic peoples” or “Semites”? Subsequent history may of course have led to a much more diverse and varied set of cultures/societies speaking Semitic languages, but that’s a different issue.
Maybe the more general question is the extent to which it is empirically accurate to think of earlier iterations of current large-scale “language families” as matching up more closely with a human population that also forms a coherent and identifiable common-ancestry and common-culture group, with the mismatch between language family and those other things then subsequently developing, typically and ironically due to the military (or economic or what have you) success of the original group then causing originally unrelated groups to shift to its language.
@drasvi:
“Semite” in English, in fact, especially as a term of racist abuse, need not even imply that the victim speaks a Semitic language at all. You can be vilified as a “Semite” without knowing a syllable of Hebrew.
The word really is thoroughly skunked in current English, drasvi. Take my word for it. It’s no use protesting that you, personally, don’t mean the word in that way (though I’m sure you don’t.) Language doesn’t work that way.
@JWB:
I know what you mean, and accept your point in principle.
However, I think the potential for misunderstanding (innocent or malicious) seems to me to be entirely grave enough to justify a high degree of protective mealy-mouthedness. A fence around the Law …
Also, even five kindred speaking the same language are not a “race.” The concept itself is invalid, and invalid in a way that impairs rational consideation of the issues even when that is not the deliberate intention.
I don’t think drasvi necessarily needs to adapt to our Anglophone-society hangups and taboos any more than my Jain-immigrant neighbors who, being pious, have a quite large swastika on their living-room wall do. Although (like them) he should be politely made aware of how the perhaps unsophisticated who are not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt may react.
If English had not become a global lingua franca, it would be more reasonable to insist that people participating in dialogues conducted in English conform to the culture-specific taboos of Anglophone societies, but that’s not where we are. We Anglo-Saxons (and various embittered Celts who have resigned themselves to speaking our tongue) have in a real sense lost our unilateral cultural control of norma loquendi.
The word really is thoroughly skunked in current English, drasvi. Take my word for it.
Here to second @DE’s observation. It’s not worth the risk of causing offence. Just avoid the word.
.We Anglo-Saxons (and various embittered Celts who have resigned themselves to speaking our tongue)
Ah. but you Anglo-Saxons are Celts too: you’re just the moiety who are not embittered about losing your ancestral tongue. We can probably find common ground …
As I have said before I am to some considerable extent romantically sad about my great-great-grandmother Finlayson abandoning her childhood milieu in the then-thriving Gaelic-speaking part of Nova Scotia to venture out into the assimilationist Anglophone wider world and ultimately spend the majority of her life in Ann Arbor, Michigan with absolutely no one to speak Gaelic with unless she wanted to socialize with some uncertain subset of the town’s Irish Catholics (across a number of non-linguistic divides). But had she not left that community and engaged in exogamy she would not have been my great-great-grandmother, so there’s that as well.
“it would be more reasonable to insist that people participating in dialogues conducted in English conform to the culture-specific taboos of Anglophone societies”
It is more reasonable to simply tell that this combination of letters sounds bad in English* rather than insisitng that it is bad because the referent is conceptually wrong.
Perhaps I would not have agreed to avoid it – but I would have understood it at least. As is it reminds me the famous в СССР секса нет (there is no sex in USSR), which implies that there is some process which cultured people never name, but those obscenities that deserve the name “sex” (and that they do abroad when begetting babies?)- we don’t do them.
In other words, confusion of one’s emotional responce to a combination of letters with one’s responce to the idea behind. Unfortunately, the “idea” is Jews (not only English speaking), Arabs, Ethiopians etc. and I’m not sure all of this – telling that (unlike it is with other similar groups of people) taking them together results in something very Wrong – is so nice to them all.
*Which was completely unexpected, even shocking for me.
Shocking because of the strong parallelism with other names of peoples and languages.
If you tell me that calling speakers of Russian langauge “Russians” is bad manners because some assholes insult people who shifted from Russian to English by…. By comparing them to Russian-speaking Russians, I will be schocked too.
@drasvi:
It is not at all unlike the way it is with other groups of people — at least some other groups of people.
Take native speakers of Germanic languages. The world is rather full of them, but there’s no single name for the group shorter than “native speakers of Germanic languages.”
Most of us here — and others are better informed than I — share the educated guess that such a group name doesn’t exist primarily, or exclusively, because the coinage and usage of such terms does not reflect linguistic categories but purported racial categories — ethnic categories, if you wish.
Accordingly, group names have in fact been proposed and used for the alleged descendants of the ancient or at least medieval population of the region in Northwestern Europe in which Germanic languages are now the majority native languages.
For some reason — probably connected to the less than pleasant relationship the German Empire had with other countries in said region — that group name doesn’t seem to have been “Germanic peoples” but rather “Nordic peoples” or “the Nordic race.” I’m unsure if that ever got further reduced to “Nordics” but I’m pretty sure it got reduced to “Aryans.”
My understanding is that calling them “Aryans” today is a shibboleth for outspoken neo-Nazi white supremacism. I wouldn’t put it as “this combination of letters sounds bad in English” but I agree it’s a taboo. A different term had to be found for the innocent ancient peoples speaking Indo-Aryan languages. I hope they don’t speak of “Aryans” out loud at AfD rallies.
However, it’s not just the word that’s taboo. It’s also the concept that’s deprecated — at least by those of us in the rootless cosmopolitan liberal elite, the smug Senior Common Room, etc. We’d argue that singling out the group to begin with, irrespective of the name used for it, is scientifically unsound and historically venomous. It plays into racist narratives and ideologies whether you want it to or not.
I dare say the argument applies symmetrically to the word “Semites” and the grouping of Jews, Arabs, Ethiopians etc. And I do mean symmetrically: the venomous racist history that makes both words taboo is a single one.
(English) Wikipedia’s piece on the Nazi racial theorist Hans Gunther has the following useful block quote from the Gunther book that came out in English translation in 1927 as _The Racial Elements In European History_.
“People may be heard speaking of a ‘Germanic,’ a ‘Latin,’ and a ‘Slav’ race; but it is at once seen that in those lands where Germanic, Romance, or Slav tongues are spoken there is the same bewildering variety in the outward appearance of their peoples, and never any such uniformity as suggests a race.
“We see, therefore, that the human groups in question – the ‘Germans,’ the ‘Latins,’ and the ‘Slavs’ – form a linguistical, not a racial combination.”
Indeed that book contains a chapter titled “The Denordization of the Peoples of German Speech” (where “German” means “Germanic”), which laments the decline in the percentage of the English and German populations that can be considered truly unmixed “Nordic” in race. (Things were supposedly better in Norway and Sweden, apparently due to the lack of a critical mass of non-Nordic persons with whom to intermarry.) The problem had apparently accelerated during the 19th century but the seeds of it could, in Gunther’s view, be traced all the way back to the arrival of Christianity among Germanic-speaking peoples and its failure to sufficiently support taboos against exogamy.
Here’s some more from Gunther (1927), showing him to be broadly in agreement with David E.: “The Semitic tongues belonged originally to the Oriental race. Owing to tribes of Oriental race having spread these tongues far and wide, they are spoken to-day by many whose blood belongs to other races.” He thus avoids using “Semitic” as a label for any of his racial categories.
The Jews are described by Gunther as a mixed group of both Oriental and “Hither Asiatic” (Vorderasiatische) racial ancestry. “The original languages of this [Hither Asiatic] race are the Caucasian (Alorodic).” And here we were talking about the Alarodian languages just last week!
Yet the Armenians are of largely unmixed Hither Asiatic blood in Gunther’s schema while speaking an IE language, again showing his care to disentangle language from race.
The idea was evidently that all speakers of Primitive Germanic were blond and blue-eyed.
If you can’t make language match up with genetics (and retain sufficient remnants of scientific honesty to admit the fact), you can always save the hypothesis by asserting that they used to match up once; interestingly, this point of complete convergence always aligns with the period when the relevant protolanguage was actually spoken.
Similarly, proto-Semitic was the language of the real Semites, but the situation has since been complicated by their nefarious habit of seducing innocent Aryan maidens and vamping ingenuous German youths, too noble by nature to see through a siren’s wiles. (Of their base commingling with even Hamites we shall not speak.)
I think this scholar’s views may not (after all) be even broadly congruent with my own. Though I value the image of my grandmother as seductress. One forgets so easily that all older women were once young women.
If I had a box for “I know what the word means, you’re the dumb one,” ingenuous would plunk right in there.
TIL from the OED that disingenious (as an error for disingenuous) is attested from 1661. But it still makes DuckDuckGo croak.
Er, WP says that “Germanic peoples” are just Latin Germani and that “modern scholariship” also applies it to Germanic speakers other than “Germani”.
No offensive crap about how this word can’t mean anything else but a “race” (and of course an inferiour one because how any race but ours can be anything but inferiour).
Ah, wait, stop.
It does not sound as some inferiour race because people here identify with it!?
Perhaps somewhere in one of those Great-Grandson of Yamnaya threads is some information about what we do/don’t know at present about the genomes of the apparent speakers of Proto-Germanic (if we buy into the theory that they were the folks living approx 2500 years ago in the area of northern Europe that matches up with the archeological remains of the so-called Jastorf-Kultur.
You’re falling foul of the etymological fallacy, I think, drasvi. or at least a close relative thereof.
You can’t tell what a word means by analysing its origin or its history. What it means comes from how it is used; what it means now, comes from how it is used now.
The issue is further complicated by the fact that different subgroups within a single speech community develop their own usages; however, as it remains one linguistic community overall, one cannot just ignore the usage of subgroups other than one’s own without laying oneself open to misinterpretation.
If you talk about “Semites” in a contemporary English setting. people will take you for an antisemite regardless of what you actually meant. Actual antisemites who use the word themselves as a slur for “Jew” will interpret you as being one of their own. Non-racists avoid the word altogether, because they are aware of how antisemites use it; if you use it, they will wrongly assume that you are not opposed to antisemitism.
Language is messy, and there are plenty of edge cases and blurred margins. In point of fact, it is factually wrong to assume that someone is a Jew-hater just because they utter the word “Semite.” But there is a pretty strong implicature that they will be.
Terms like “Germanic peoples” are much less clearcut, but “people” again has an implicature that you are talking about “race.” It’s an implicature, not an implication, that’s to say, it can be denied without self-contradiction: “By Germanic peoples, I do not imply that they form a Germanic ‘race’.”
Still, the implicature is there, and it’s probably better not to back oneself into a linguistic corner where you have to deny it, by saying something like “Germanic-speaking peoples” in the first place. After all, that was good enough for that rabidly woke crypto-commie Winston Churchill:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_English-Speaking_Peoples
@drasvi:
The (English) Wikipedia article on Germanic peoples begins thus:
Later it reports the following:
Eventually it ends thus:
I have no standing to opine on the scientific usefulness or appropriateness of grouping certain peoples inhabiting Northern Europe in the 1st to 4th or even 6th centuries CE under the label “Germanic.” In particular, if your own take is that discarding this label for those peoples as “politically abused and emotionally charged” is political correctness gone mad, I’m rather indifferent myself. I tend to think of those peoples as “barbarians” anyway, which is hardly more politically correct.
On the other hand, I see no evidence that anyone except possibly you and Humpty Dumpty uses the label “Germanic peoples” to describe the grouping of present-day native speakers of Germanic languages (Marshallese, Bermudian, Singaporean, Ni-Vanuatu, Liberian …). If you’d like to advocate for this usage, I can see an argument that neo-Nazis would hate it and it serves them right. But it doesn’t seem to be a usage that’s already out there!
I think that it is perfectly possible to suggest that speakers of Germanic languages in Roman times shared many elements of a common culture; in fact, given my views on how language is deeply entwined with culture, I’m more or less obliged to accept that in some degree.
But many features of this supposed culture are highly conjectural (notably, a fair bit is naively projected back from Snorri Sturluson’s euhemerising and satirical entertainments written a couple of centuries after even Iceland became officially Christian. It’s not so different from pretending to reconstruct pre-Christian British religion from the Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi.)
And of course it is wholly false to imply that a shared culture necessarily implies shared genes. Counterexamples abound in the modern world, and there seems to be no good reason whatever to declare that there were none in the old times.
The classical Greeks most definitely believed that they shared a culture, but they did not believe that they were all cousins. The Athenians reckoned that they were autochthonous; the Spartan ruling caste, not so much (they hardly could, given that they were ruling over/terrorising a much more numerous Greek-speaking population who were already there when they arrived.)
Roman citizenship had nothing to do with biological descent at all (at most, with fictive adoption); but you would hardly claim that there was no Roman common culture.
veertig dae en veertig nagte
soek ons die mystic boer
@Giacomo, I keep complaining (a couple of times here) that I have a problem with “Russians” and “Arabs”.
I have no slightest idea what these words mean:)
Of course when someone (me or someone else) says “I’m Russian” we are able to guess some things about her. Some of them correctly. It is informative.
gullgubber?
The italics is just what began playing in my head. Die Mystic Boer by Valiant Swart (the lyrics)
“are able to guess some things about her. Some of them correctly. It is informative.”
I’d think that she’s an émigré (most Russians writing on English forums are) or that she is from Moscow (most of those who are not émigrés are Muscovites). I’m from Moscow, I’m not an émigré… or I don’t know. Partly maybe. I don’t treat Moscow as my “base” and other countries as “foreign”. Tickets are cheap, you can be in more than one country:) Also of coruse L1 Russian and attending a Russian school in Moscow and having read all those books educated Russians read. All of this is true not only for ethnic Russians but many other peoples with L1 Russian. Of course we can say that ethnic Russians are those who call themselves so, but it is more complicated with “Arabs”.
If I heard someone nowadays refer to a person as a “Slav” I would think they were role-playing an early 20th century racialist, or that *shudder* they were serious. In fact, it would be very much like referring to someone as a Semite, or as Latin.
By the conflict-with-the-Romans period discussed in what GP block-quotes there has already been quite a lot of development since the 500 B.C. period I had focused on. Proto-Germanic has broken up into daughter languages, the geographical range of “Germanic-speaking peoples” has expanded quite considerably, and there have no doubt been lots of what the genome-analyzers call “admixture events” with non-Germanic-speakers incident to that expansion.
David E. is correct that it is not necessarily the case that the relatively geographically confined population with a common culture that spoke Proto-Germanic as of 500 B.C. have been a uniform or coherent group with respect to their genes. But it’s not necessarily the case that they weren’t. Perhaps in the nearish future we will have more evidence on that question. Unless we decide that Bad People might do Bad Things if the evidence turned out a particular way and thus decide to squelch the research.
I recently read John James’ Votan, which had been vegetating unread on my Kindle as a potential holiday read for years. The tl;dr is that it’s about a young, wily and totally unscrupulous (though engaging) Greek merchant from about Trajan’s time called Photinus, who travels in the German lands, and (you guessed it) becomes Woden/Odin. It has many fun moments, though it’s not what you might call deep.
I think the sequel, For All the Gold in Ireland (in which our hero basically becomes Manawyddan from the Mabinogion) is actually better. I hadn’t heard of it previously at all (it came bundled with Votan.) It probably does help to know the Four Branches, so you get what he’s riffing off.
@Y,
I mentioned (again) my problem with “Russians”, because I think my own problem with such labels is more serious than that of most people I know.
Moreover, I remember one conversation about “Germanic peoples” with my friend. I was telling (as I often do) that calling so all various tribes named by Romans when often we know literally nothing but a name is misleading. And then we discussed identity, my freind was confidently telling that common langauge was strongly associated with common identity and I was expressing doubts.
But I did not mean, that “a Semite” would NOT sound strange in an unnatural context where people normally use some other (weird) label and where it does not point to a “box” in the listener’s head. We were discussing “”Semitic people(s)” etc, rather than “a Semite”.
I can call a person “Slav” only in SOME contexts. E.g. when discussing a (Lusatian) Sorb with someone who does not know who are they. “No, not exactly German*, she is a Slav/Slavic, these people are called Sorbs… “” etc.
Or maybe if I don’t know if she’s a Pole or Belarusian or Serb or what but some Slavic country. I’m more likely to say “some Slavic country”. But as I understand this use of Semitic (any attributive use where the noun is not “language(s)” ) is considered wrong here.
* perhaps I would not have said “not exactly German” because they are Germans of course. It is here just to point at the context.
“The Latins and blacks, meanwhile, are constantly at each other’s throats.” From a 1972 book titled _The Making of a Slum_, about the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx. But “Latins” here does not mean “speakers of any Romance language, collectively.” It was at least in NYC speech back then a synonym/euphemism for “Puerto Ricans.” (This was back when NYC had no particularly significant Hispanic population other than Puerto Ricans.) I don’t think it was in its prime a slur, but it then acquired over time negative baggage due to the operations of the euphemism treadmill and fell out of favor.
It was still in use at least fictitiously in 1987 when Tom Wolfe published _The Bonfire of the Vanities_. In a passage describing the prosecutor Larry Kramer, raised in a liberal Jewish household: “For a start, it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, ‘What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail.'”
One certainly comes across “Latin” in the European context as a catchall label for Portuguese-Spanish-Italian (though, curiously, not French.)
I remember years ago reading an account of how Ceaușescu got away with exercising considerable autonomy from Moscow when the Czechs didn’t, which suggested that the Kremlin regarded the Romanians as mere “harmless Latins”, whereas dissent by fellow-Slavs was a serious matter. (It wasn’t a very deep piece.)
Curiously, “Latin lovers” don’t seem to be French, usually, either.
There’s “Latin America” of course. I’m not sure if French Guiana is allowed to play with the other Latins there.
The “We are not Slavs but descendants of the Ancient Romans” thing was of course a big theme in Romanian nationalist rhetoric from the 19th century forward and Ceaucescu AFAIK certainly did not try to suppress that sort of thing in the interests of international proletarian solidarity or anything. I don’t think “harmless” was the aspect of Latin-ness the nationalist ideologues had traditionally stressed, but sometimes you play the hand you have in an unexpected way that meets the tactical needs of the situation.
speaking only for myself, i understand anyone who regularly uses any of the race-science category terms (from “semites” to “semitic peoples” to “nordics” to “germanic peoples” to “turanians” to “caucasians” to “indo-europeans” to “sub-saharan africans” and onward) outside of specific technical contexts, or without a lot of clear signs that they’re both conscious and critical of the histories behind them, to be quite likely to be two to five well-crafted organizing conversations from conversion into a supporter of one or another racial-nationalist theology, from pan-turanism or zionism to “great replacement” conspiracism to the full hyperboreanist “root races” package.
that’s not a moral judgement; it’s a seat-of-the-pants gauge of where people’s ideological immune system is at in relation to this set of very widely propagandized ideas, promoted by very well-funded (and in many cases actively or passively state-supported) organizations. i think the continued acceptance of their terminology in any form has played (and continues to play) a very significant role in how these theologies have been so thoroughly normalized in the u.s. (and my impression is in europe as well) over the past fifty years.
My feelings are much the same (as you will be unsurprised to hear.)
However, I think there is a difficulty because of the ambiguity of many of these labels between a “racial” and a cultural meaning.
Of course, it’s a fragile ambiguity: ethnonationalists exist to abolish it, and normal people can be betrayed into interpreting cultural phenomena in essentialist biological terms by the ambiguity.
However, it is possible to insist, robustly, on the cultural meaning as the only legitimate one. The French [culture-bearers] at their best (a major qualification) have done this: there is no paradox in being a black Frenchwoman or black Frenchman. Our own Scottish and Welsh nationalists have pretty thoroughly achieved something like this: Saunders Lewis, co-founder of Plaid Cymru, was straightforwardly ethnonationalist (and antisemitic) but I was enjoined to vote for Plaid in the last election by some Muslim fellow-townsmen coming out of Friday prayers at the mosque. Cymru am byth! (I didn’t, though.)
Cultural imperialism (hello, France!) is itself obviously not at all unproblematic even if successfully purified from racism, but it’s problematic in significantly different ways. And cultures really can differ in ways where it is entirely proper to suggest that the practices of one culture really should be adopted by another. How you go about achieving that is the issue. A case in point is FGM, where all too many well-meaning Westerners have been suckered in to what is essentially a racist framing of the issues. But it’s not wrong to say that FGM is just plain wrong and must stop. Other cases can be more difficult … (often because of the great difficulty people have in even being aware that significant aspects of our own culture are not human universals and might even be somewhat undesirable.)
There are a number of features of traditional Kusaasi culture that really should be adopted by the British. But this must be done by persuasion and example, not imposed by force, taking care to preserve the many truly valuable aspects of traditional British culture. A lengthy period of transition will certainly be called for.
There’s “Latin America” of course. I’m not sure if French Guiana is allowed to play with the other Latins there.
I was taught in elementary school that “Latin America” included French Guiana, Haiti, and (if knowledge of them had reached our tender brains) the French-speaking Caribbean islands, but I don’t think that’s normal U.S. usage. I’d guess Quebec was mentioned, but unfortunately I can’t remember whether it was included in Latin America or not.
“Latino” certainly does not include people from the Francophone Americas.
Now I’m intrigued by what shadowy but well-funded groups are currently lurking out there in the background promoting Hyperborean root-race theory. I mean, it’s been more than 40 years since Warner Bros. Records has released an album by a big-name rock star featuring lyrics overtly reflecting a fascination with the writings of Alice Bailey.
On the rap/hiphop side of the record industry there are certainly more recent albums with lyrics influenced by e.g. the esoteric/essentialist understanding of race taught by the Nation of Gods and Earths, and I suppose if you try to figure out that group’s theological genealogy there might be some Blavatsky a few steps back in one of the converging pathways.
A book on cults that I once read had a chapter on the “Armstrong Polycult”, the Armstrong in question being the British Israelism-pusher
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_W._Armstrong
Sadly, “Armstrong Polycult” does not seem to be a widely accepted name among outsiders, let alone adherents. Myself, I think they’re missing a trick there. I mean, it sounds way cool … quite Lovecraftian, even.
Not as good as “Hyperborean” though,
:Maybe “Hyperberean” has possibilies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berean_Christadelphians
This would be the group that took Bereanism too far. Like Hyper-Calvinists, but more Berean and less Calvinist.
Not sure why the book authors felt that Armstrongism was particularly “poly.” AFAIK “polycult” isn’t some sort of accepted technical term.
It was from an Armstrong-Polycultic publication that I first learned over 40 years ago that the European Union (it may have actually still have been billed as a mere “Community” at the time) was identifiable with the Beast prophesied in Revelation. This was because inter alia its then-ten members (so this was after Greece was added but before Spain and Portugal were) corresponded to the Beast’s ten horns.
In Norway’s 1972 EEC referendum, this was an actual argument among the Conservative Lutheran caucus. Also: The whore of Babylon.
Edit: Or perhaps not. I actually remember it from the 1994 referendum, made by Arthur Berg, editor of the conservative Christian newspaper Dagen, but he was clearly a relic from 1972.
Good to know that Armstrong was drawing upon sound Lutheran work rather than just freelancing like certain other polycult leaders might.
Sadly, “Armstrong Polycult” does not seem to be a widely accepted name among outsiders, let alone adherents. Myself, I think they’re missing a trick there. I mean, it sounds way cool … quite Lovecraftian, even.
Can we change it to “Polypcult”, suggesting tentacles?
I think that it was indeed the subliminal effect of the silent (and mystically hidden) p that evoked* the Great Old Ones for me.
* Evoking is fine. Invoking, not so much.
@JWB:
i was using hyperboreanism to mark one end of a spectrum, but if we take it as a mocking tag for the cluster of ideologies that use varied versions of the “root race” model (from the madison grant/lothrop stoddard biologized recension to the blavatsky/steiner ‘sophical classic interpretation), at this point, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say the republican party. the wagging tail that has become that particular dog is heavily entangled with several different ideological streams that flow from the akashic spring. the The Empire Never Ended podcast, which i’ve plugged here before is a great place for far more terrifying detail about these connections than anyone needs, but to name a few that come from different points in that ideological cluster:
– basically all of the major u.s. white nationalist projects (Christian Identity, for instance, takes its version from british israelite pre-adamism);
– many of the varied “traditionalist” currents on the right that are shaped by evola or guénon’s thought (often reaching out towards full hyperboreanism via the “kali yuga” idea of successively degenerating epochs and their inhabitants);
– the organizations influenced by our recent acquaintance roger pearson’s nordic indo-europeanism, which he brought from his own Northern League for North European Friendship and Council for American Affairs into his work with the Heritage Foundation, Foreign Policy Research Institute, and American Security Council.
perhaps more directly, however, and certainly on a somewhat more absurd, and yet scarier, note:
Celestial Seasonings, the #1 u.s. tea company and producer of the world’s best-selling herbal infusion, was for decades (and might still be; it’s a bit unclear) tightly bound up with the Urantia Foundation, which exists to promote The Urantia Book, an ancient-aliens/eugenic-multiverse version of “root race” ideology. The Urantia Book is the source of the brand’s name, and of the original inspirational quotes attached to its teabags; the company’s money (and promotion, including through internal use, of the book) is a big part of what enabled the Foundation to stay in business. Celestial Seasonings’ founder, mo siegel, remains president of the Urantia Foundation, and in 2010 convened a panel promoting eugenics that included kermit anderson, then the genetic screening program director at Kaiser Permanente.
and then there’s the Pioneer Fund/Human Diversity Foundation, and the rest of the much less theatrical sphere that funds overtly eugenic pseudoscience in the grant/stoddard tradition.
and yes, the mad-scientist element of Five Percenter and Nation of Islam sacred history almost certainly traces back to the blavatsky nexus, probably by way of the Moorish Science Temple and its Aquarian Gospel and Rosicrucian sources (and wow! is it ever impossible to talk about these lineages of esotericism without sounding like an absolute wingnut).
Now I’m intrigued by what shadowy but well-funded groups are currently lurking out there in the background promoting Hyperborean root-race theory. I mean, it’s been more than 40 years since Warner Bros. Records has released an album by a big-name rock star featuring lyrics overtly reflecting a fascination with the writings of Alice Bailey.
I was wondering about those groups too. I realize that I wouldn’t be approached by any of them, since the only one I could possibly qualify for is Zionism. (ObSF: I’m getting the feeling of the kind of conversion that occurs in John Barnes’s Daybreak trilogy, which I thought was well done, though it may have ended his fiction career. That wasn’t based on any kind of racial idea, though.)
A glance at Wikipedia suggests that the rock star may have been Van Morrison or Lou Reed but perhaps more likely Todd Rundgren.
I thought Barnes’ Century Next Door series was brilliant, though deeply uncomfortable to read in places.
I agree (mostly) with Jo Walton on Kaleidoscope Century: “Kaleidoscope Century is one of the most unpleasant books I’ve ever read, I can hardly believe I’ve read it again. All the same it’s a major work and very nearly a masterpiece… ”
https://reactormag.com/nasty-but-brilliant-john-barnes-kaleidoscope-century/
The others (particular the first and last of the series) are not quite so disturbing. The last is quite moving. Barnes is not at all the nihilist that Walsh (very understandably) took him for on the basis of Kaleidoscope Century, at least to judge by that. I haven’t read the Daybreak series.
@Jerry F.: I was thinking of Van’s 1982 Bailey-influenced album (_Beautiful Vision_) since it’s more recent than Todd’s Bailey-influenced album and the supposed influence on Lou is more diffuse. I imagine that in more recent years than 1982 the label might have counseled against a song title like “Aryan Mist,”* but those were different times. I think the best song on the album is “Cleaning Windows,” which arguably can have an esoteric reading but on its surface is just a nostalgic song about being 16 in 1961 Belfast, having left school to work full-time as a window washer while trying to get started as a professional musician on the weekends. He doesn’t mention anything theosophical or “Aryan” or even “Celtic” in that one, although does mention that he was at the time reading Kerouac’s Dharma Bums and one of Christmas Humphreys’ books on Zen, so clearly someone who may be a good prospect for “esoteric teachings” of various sorts in the future.**
Also for Jerry: You may not think you qualify ethnically to be a Pan-Turanian in the strict sense, but perhaps they are welcoming what the young people today call “allies”?
As to the herbal-tea connection rozele mentions, a quick check of SEC filings indicates that Mo Siegel has had no affiliation with Hain Celestial, Inc. since 2002, although he did thereafter serve on the board of directors of Whole Food Markets until it got bought up by Amazon in 2017. Long long ago, the summer before my last year of law school, I worked for a law firm that did trademark work for the Urantia Foundation. And I subsequently represented a guy whose tenure at Hain Celestial overlapped with the end of Siegel’s final stint there, although I represented that guy solely with respect to legal difficulties arising from problems at the company where he had worked previously. Truly the tentacles are everywhere …
*The only personage referenced by name in the lyrics to “Aryan Mist” is Krishna, who was undoubtedly a speaker of an Indo-Aryan language. That’s one of three songs on the album where the lyrics were co-written by Hugh Murphy (1946-98), whom Van never worked with again and who is probably best known as the co-producer of Gerry Rafferty’s ’78 smash hit “Baker Street.” Maybe Hugh was a Bailey devotee.
**Okay, okay, Humphreys was indeed a Theosophist and a Shakespeare-didn’t-write-his-own-plays theorist as well as an explainer of Buddhism to Anglophone readers. I don’t know how much Theosophical material or spin there was in whichever of his Zen books teenage Van was reading in ’61.
as i understand it, the only way Celestial Seasonings would still have direct Urantian connections would be if there are still executives from the siegel era who’re believers in the mix – which seems unlikely. but the Sleepytime money is still what’s keeping Urantianism a going concern, and i assume will long after the siegel goes off to his eternal cozy, presumably somewhere in havona if not on the isle of paradise.
@David Eddshaw: Daybreak was also quite unpleasant to read, especially toward the end. But I’m disappointed to see that Barnes has apparently not published any SF since.
@j.W.B. Thanks for the answer on Van Morrison. As for my recruitability for pan-Turanianism, two of my great-grandparents were almost certainly from Hungary… and I got some instruction on Finnish pronunciation from a Finn…
@DE, actually this all is fascinating.
I can choise the tone of my comments from a very wide range:
I can choose to get angry and have a good reason, but I also understand how easily misunderstandings arise and how easy it is to be self-righteous when different cultural spheres clash. Even when it is not something like gender roles among Arabs and Russians but merely scholarly terminology. So I can choose to be friendly.
Or just be fascinated.
You don’t understand that you’re
(1) exercising cultural domination. (I mean English speaking scholars vs. Russian scholars – but quite possible English speakers vs. Semites themselves)
(2) making me feel that you’re literally forcing your racist model of the world (or of Semitic speakers) down my throat.
(Oh yes, you are also urging me to throw it up once you succeed. It is as if your left hand is forcefully promoting racism, and the right hand rejecting it. But you haven’t succeded yet, so we are at the stage of forcing it down my throat.)
I WOULD have thought you’re a racist, if I did not know you are not. Knowing you I understand that what is going on is yet another instance of a cultural barrier.
No, I don’t mean this all is your goal. I deliberately choose an angered tone:)
But your goal is one thing and the effect of what you say is another thing. The effect is unambigously “forcing racism down my throat”.
Your question to me – what Semites can mean if not a race? – is one a racist would have asked.
Your stubborn replacement of “Semitic people(s)” in WP which we began to discuss with “race” is what a racist would do.
I understand that the “step 1” (the problem) is making me “understand” that the only meaningful thing “Semites” can mean is a race (racism) and then the “step 2” will be claiming that as a race they are not “meaningful” either. (perhaps there is a contradiction here).
Alas we’re at the step 1, I don’t want this crap in my head and I don’t want to think of Semites as race (in your sense of the word), especially with the attached understanding that they are going to be an inferiour race.
I likely would not have chosen such a tone if I… Hm. Did not find yours and LH’s partonising.
What I feel is fascination, as I said:)
drasvi, I am a native speaker of English providing you with up-to-date information about English usage. This includes sociolinguistic observations about the usage of other L1 English speakers which I strongly deprecate, and advise against using on the grounds that if you do use it, you will give other L1 English speakers a completely wrong impression of your own character and opinions.
If you interpret that as “exercising cultural domination” then you have a very odd notion of cultural domination.
I may have to contact my old Kusaasi language consultants and berate them for trying to dominate me culturally by telling me that some usages were preferable to others when speaking Kusaal. “Why the devil should I call an unrelated woman of my own age ‘my mother-in-law’ to be ‘polite’, as you put it? That is really offensive in English, you misogynist!”
I do come across as patronising without meaning to be sometimes, and I’m sorry for it. But the tone of your last comments is much worse than patronising, and I would be quite seriously offended by it if I hadn’t learnt by now that you’re a basically decent person.
drasvi, I too am having a hard time understanding what you’re taking offense at. Maybe if I turn it around it will help. Suppose you told me I shouldn’t use the word жид when speaking Russian because it’s offensive, and I said “Why? I’ve read Russian authors who use it, and it’s the same word as English Jew! Are you trying to fool me or colonize me??”
And I promise you nobody is trying to patronize you.
DE, whether it is “worse” then patronising depends on how bad is patronising.
My tone is bad. Deliberately.
But no, I’m not interested in conflict. I just want you and others to realise:
While you can react at use of the term as promotion of racism – I react at your reaction as “promotion of racism” too. And have a reason for this.
My stubborn disagreement has a lot to do with the desire NOT to get it inside my head. To not become a racist.
Do you expect me do it out of politeness? I won’t, sorry.
I don’t do such things out of politeness. I do many things for this, but “becoming a racist” is hardly one of them.
I’m not sure anyone will understand it if I choose a softer tone.
@LH, I’m not offended.
I do in reality find this all fascinating. But I don’t know how I can get my point across if I don’t yell:)
So I do and it is not as much an immediate reaction as a planned move. It is sincere in that some of my anger is sincere – but it is not directed at you or DE.
The source of anger is same as for everyone: irritation with racism. And I won’t think DE (or you , but it is DE who spoke about race) is a racist of course.
PS. “patronising” refers to exactly one your comment, where you told that “DE explained to me” why the concept is wrong. You know that neither I nor you nor DE are specialists in history and culture of the ME or Semitic linguistics – but all of us know some things about it. We don’t need to “explain” basics to each other.
How does avoiding the word “Semite” when communicating in English turn you into a racist?
There are perfectly good reasons for avoiding the word which do not by any conceivable stretch of the imagination entail giving any ground to racists or compromising with them in the slightest.
I’m not sure anyone will understand it if I choose a softer tone.
No, the opposite. Your tone makes me despair of understanding you, and suggests that you have no rational reason for your stance. I suspect that you do have a reason (even if I may not agree with it) and I would be a lot more likely to understand what you mean if you dialled it back a bit. This is not like you and not worthy of you.
(I have a better idea of why you react to the word “Nazi” as you do than I once did, thanks to your own explanations, and more generally I have quite often found that our positions are really very alike once misunderstandings have been cleared away, so that we can once again find ourselves in furious agreement.)
I wonder if your feeling is something like “the racists have taken the perfectly good word ‘Semite’ and tried to pervert its meaning by association with repellent and false docrines. They should not be allowed to get away with stealing our word like that, and if I stop using it in the right sense, I’ve conceded the field to the bad guys”?
I can understand that, if so. (And there is a highly honourable tradition of oppressed groups actively reclaiming words for themselves from their oppressors.)
I don’t think it’s practical (or even desirable) in this particular case, for several reasons, but the idea itself is neither wicked nor stupid.
`the racists have taken the perfectly good word ‘Semite’ and tried to pervert its meaning by association with repellent and false doctrines. They should not be allowed to get away with stealing our word like that…’
is a reasonable position but the issue seems to be about what `Semite’ should then be supposed to mean: which may be a poisoned well to draw from.
Yes. It would be objectionable on a number of grounds even if there were no antisemites in this world, but the objections might then not amount to enough to overturn a long-established usage.
A slightly separate issue is the objectionable nature of using classificatory terms at all in this way, even “the English” or “the French”, given that it can be the prelude to some sweeping generalisation meant to denigrate (or at best to lump together all sorts of very different people under a label that you’ve decided is the only thing that really matters about them.)
But making that into some sort of absolute principle can easily lead to the sort of hypersensitive silliness that the far-right likes to pretend is present in all attempts to call out hate speech. (We shouldn’t give them the ammunition.)
A fair number of names for language groups are unfortunate to some degree, though often for reasons of inaccuracy or ambiguity rather than anything more serious.
In my own area of interest, “Gur” doesn’t have a lot to recommend it as a name. I quite like the French “voltaïque”; that used to be problematic when Burkina Faso was still Haute-Volta (just as most speakers of Chadic languages don’t live in Chad, and most people in Chad don’t speak Chadic languages.) Not an issue now, though.
Adams Bodomo and his associates have pushed for “Mabia” to replace “Gur”, but I think it’s pretty problematic, nice as it is to have a name based on an actual African term. Different writers use it for quite different groups, always including Western Oti-Volta but varying enormously in how much of the rest of “Gur” is included. And it doesn’t actually work as advertised: it’s based on the word for “sibling” in Bodomo’s own L1, Dagaare, but not only are the reflexes somewhat different even within Western Oti-Volta (e.g. Kusaal mabiig) but the first element ma “mother” appears only in WOV and no other branch even of Oti-Volta. I think “Mabia” would be a reasonable substitute for the unwieldy “Western Oti-Volta” myself (and that would also free up the label “Western Oti-Volta” for everything in Oti-Volta that isn’t Eastern Oti-Volta or Gurma) but nobody is actually in a position to make this happen …
On balance, I think there’s a lot to be said for the usual Niger-Congo-studies default of naming language groups after neighbouring rivers (with the Atlantic and the Sahara as honorary rivers.) You can’t argue with a river.
default of naming language groups after neighbouring rivers
I just learned that Algic has nothing to do with Algonquian. It’s a repurposing (by Teeter) of an older usage, coined by Schoolcraft, a portmanteau of “Allegheny” and “Atlantic”.
jack morava, same as with other ethnonyms.
I asked several times if there is an issue with this specific one (other than that “some bad people in the West like it”) other than that with such ethnic labels in general.
By “such” I mean “Xish langauges – Xish peoples” but actually I believe we have the same issue with ALL ethnonyms. Because I do have a problem with Russians and Arabs.
DE kept avoiding answering it directly (that is responded by … switching to an adjacent but different topic), then said that the problem is exactly how these bad people use it.
LH responded… by saying that the concept is wrong. Without answering if it is just as wrong as all such ethnonyms.
rozele I think does not like the Biblical roots of the label (but it is not the concept, just a sequence of sounds).
All of this makes me think that the consensus is that it is fully parallel to Mandé etc. (and maybe also Russians, Arabs etc.)
Did you read my comment about жид, and did you understand the parallel?
@LH, nobody here asked me to avoid this word, and I never asked any of you to use it.
I don’t know what is my opinion of this word.
If you remember I was asking DE if there are any problems with it other than that certain bad people like it. I was not telling “no, it is a good word”.
Given that the referent (as a scientific term) is Semitic peoples, I would love to first learn their (I mean Jews with all sorts of L1, Ethiopians, Arabs, Assyrians etc. etc.) opinion.
What I don’t like is not the fact that you’re avoiding it, but the methods of explaining your (the people’s who don’t like it) point to others.
At least one Jewish Hatter has told you their opinion, drasvi.
If you use “Semite” to decribe people in a contemporary English-language context, people will assume that you are antisemitic. A Jew-hater. The usage in other languages has no bearing on this point at all. It’s irrelevant. Usage in older literary sources is also irrelevant. Presumed “scientific” meanings are irrelevant.
We know you’re not antisemitic. Other people won’t.
I’m not avoiding anything. Neither is anyone else here. (Except, perhaps, you.)
I really have no idea how to make it any plainer. If you persist in this I will assume that you are trolling us.
At least one Jewish Hatter has told you their opinion, drasvi.
+1
LH, are Paris, Lutetia, Paris, Lutèce, Parizh, Lutetsiya (or John and Ioann etc.) six different words from three different langauges?
Not quite. Some elements do belong to English, French and Russian (-zh). Some are international.
Such words can become more “English”.
“Jew” and “еврей, еврейка” are very much English and Russian words. Ask someone fluent in both langauges what is the English translation for еврей. You’ll hear a “Jew” (perhaps with the further explanation that in modern English “he/she’s a Jew” – and especially “she’s a Jewess” sounds less good than “he/she’s Jewish” and same with other ethnonyms). The correspondence еврей-Hebrew only works where “a Hebrew” is used in English. The etymology… Unlike “loaf – хлеб” a speaker CAN in principle guess it. IF she thinks about it.
_______
It is different for “Semites”.
It is an international scholarly term. It does not belong to English or Russian.
And the annoying (or pleasant for some people) associations don’t belong to English either.
They belong to a cultural sphere, not language.
And this cultural sphere is not “L1 English speakers”. These associations likely are different for some English speakers and same for some speakers of some other langauges.
DFTT.
” If you persist in this I will assume that you are trolling us.”
DE, fuck off, please.
PS, I have absolutely no other reaction at what I quoted. Assume whatever you please.
Perhaps at least someone will read my explanation that I’m not supporting the term, I just don’t like your methods as an explanation that I am not supporting the term but don’t like your methods.
Perhaps not:)
But there is no point in talking to someone who “assumes you’re a troll” or especially “will assume” if you don’t start liking her methods.
[Hat: in hindsight, “DFTT” was needlessly provocative. Apologies. Happy for you to delete it (and this.) Too late for me to do so.]
Be assured I have no idea what it means, and did not google it either:-E
I don’t know if it did its provocative job or not. “If you persist I will…” etc is already unambigous declaraction of an attitude incompatible with freindly disccussion.
Also: despite the above, I remain a freind. I don’t feel any hostility or whatever*.
My opinion of your methods is now even worse than it was, though:)))))
*I read this ‘a troll’ hundreds times ona langauge exchange forum, but the addressee was not me. Just one guy or gal from A misunderstood a guy or gal from B and found a hadny explanation.
I’m used to it:)
You know what, drasvi – you’re right, I should not have implied that you were trolling. It was aggressive and uncalled-for. I’m sorry.
I have mentioned before that “fuck” in English is much ruder than supposed by many foreigners, even those with an otherwise excellent command of English, by the way.
Forbearance is feeding this state of affairs. Initially well-meaning restraint has morphed into exasperated, apologetic co-dependency. That’s what DFTT warns against. The Tar-Baby is not to blame for this.
Point.
(The rest is silence.)
DE, I left unanswered (mostly because I did not have enough time for this) many comments addressed to me.
Giacomo’s.
LH’s.
Yours.
In some of them I was asked to explain myself.
I would have written more than the above if I did have time and energy. Not because I like the topic. I do NOT.
Because I feel I owe a longer explanation.
It WON’T be understood. But a shorter one CAN”T be understood.
You call it “persisting”.
I said clearly enough that I do not “support” use of this term – and you keep pretending that I’m promoting it.
___
Stu, DE go fuck yourselves, please
(updated after DE’s correction. I did not really mean “fuck off”, it sounds contemptuous)
And DE, please consider the possibility that
(1) when you keep insisting in conversation with someone accustomed to a scholarly tradition (and also some colloquial tradition) where “Semites” , “Semitic peoples” etc. are neutral scientific terms that those can in principle only refer to a race (and not in the old neutral sense “a people”, no, an inferiour race, no less) – keep replacing them with “Semitic race” in fact – that can be unpleasant for him if he does not want to think about them so.
(1.1) when you put “scientific” in quotemarks you express a certain attitude to this tradition.
(2) that when he informs you about this, you have just as many reasons to be grateful as he does for your warning about English speakers.
No, if you say what “English-speakers” will think about me and I only tell what I personally would have thought of you – this does not mean I’m rude. It is symmetrical. I just only speak for myself.
But I really would have thought you’re a racist.
___
Not sure DE is willing to even read this, but I still owe an explanation to others.
And yes, the fact that we’re using your “home” language DOES make you so insensitive to such things that … er, that it becomes easier to believe I”m a troll than consider a possibility that you are hurting someone’s feelings by a racist usage.
Yes, Russian speakers too are always happy to correct L2 Russian users.
This all has absolutely nothign to do with English language.
No more than Mark Twain’s joke about Moroccan ladies who have to hide their faces because those faces are ugly is funny for his readers and not the ladies “because it is funny in English”.
English – or rather one’s “home” langauge – just feeds into sefl-righteousness. You have referred to it – and now everyone has to agree.
It is the culture. Specifically: different evolution of the term in different schools/scholarly traditions (some began to avoid it and question the concept as a reaction on local racism – the others did not because racism never took this shape there) and different cultures (different associations).
Yes, of course, the first of the two traditions is the one better known to L1 English readers.
Yes, of course, the first of the two cultures is the one of most L1 English readers.
And in the world where the English Wikipedia is read by Ethiopians and scientists from all over the world have to write their articles in English for L2 English readers and L1 readers likewise feelings of English speakers of course should be taken into account. But not only thiers.
Those of Ethiopians (and we are discussing the specific solution in Wikipedia if you haven’t forgotten) too.
Resolving the mismatch in terminologies and concepts by simple reference to “it’s the English langauge, so just do as we do!” is idiotic, especially when the “English” solution is staying away from the concept and not just the term and when there is no synonym:/
Again: the idea is NOT that your feelings should not be taken into account.
The idea is that you too have to take into account feelings and needs of others – and not just your minorities but people abroad too – even though and even especially because the “langauge of science” is your home language.
When reminding of those feelings and needs of others is immediately interpreted as indifference to yours “because it is English” – that is what I called cultrual domination (NOT “colonisation”! Sudan is colonising its black/pagan south, Russia is maybe too colonising something – but English speakers are NOT colonising either country. Some do believe that South Sudan is thier attempt to take local oil – I have no idea, but if so it is still competition with Arabs).
I think I wrote almost everything, so a missing detail.
@Giacomo, (I began writign this as my answer to Giacomo a couple days ago, I’ll complete it) all the time I kept in mind the (messy) solution in WP (which for DE is better than nothing and for me is weird). If the topic drifted elsewhere then not for me.
So there is univeral and productive pattern: French language, French culture, French people, the French. This is reproduced almost mindlessly.
Now what if we find some day that WP says that “Polish people” and basically Polish everything other than language is ugly offensive concept? And of course “Poles”.
For me this will sound as a suggestion that there is something wrong with Poles. When the term and the concept is dirty – this dirtiness becomes associated with the referent.
Also usually such things happen with groups like “women” or “blacks”.
You know what is wrong with women and blacks?
They are ‘marked’ groups.
Objects of either racism and sexism or protection from racism and sexism.
So it will suggest that “Poles” are like, blacks or women, just Poles.
I’m not confiden that Semitic speakers will be pleased to find this mess… But I’m not confident they will be displeased either. One should ask them. Thanks to the divide between the three (more actually) religions they don’t share common identity (unlike Poles). But generally, as with blacks and women a good idea is making them/letting them become subjects and not just objects.
___
When I told that the anti-Semitic use of the word is not the only one around, I mean partly other scientific schools but mostly just that this transformation “Semitic langauges – Semitic peoples” is absolutely automatical. It happens in L1 English heads too, I think. Definitely in L2 heads. So it is not just anti-Semites.
This should be somehow accounted for: you make them ‘marked’ when you try to do something about “Semitic peoples” but only about them.
@drasvi:
I understand and respect that you’re resentful and angry at finding your own culture and tradition marginalized by the dominant US-led alternative. But all the pent-up resentment you feel about this cannot possibly have been accumulated just over the short lifespan of this thread, nor over the usage of the word Semitic. Make your offended outbursts “Fuck the US! Fuck the West! Fuck your navel-gazing obsession with Nazism!” and I doubt anyone here will mind, though we’ll certainly vary in our sympathy for your point of view.
Instead, you chose to hurl repeated insults at well-meaning individuals who had politely tried to explain what the mainstream Western view of both the word Semitic and the concept of “Semitic peoples” is, and what reasons underpin that view. Irrespective of your culture and tradition, this choice is deeply offensive and precludes any further debate.
Giacomo, if you believe that telling me that I’m trolling you (“trolling us”) is “well-meaning”, you will possibly undertand that my polite and well-meaning recommendation to join them well-meaning people is my доброе напутствие to you and not an insult.
I did not enjoy this debate, DE kept trying to establish a link between “Semites” and “race” by manipulative means (replacing the phrase “Semitic peoples” with “Semitic race” etc.). It felt as an attempt to make me think of them so. I don’t want to think of them so. The request to explain who they can be if not a race was particularly unpleasant.
I nevertheless found time yesterday to respond to people who requested an explanation from me. Meanwhile I was extremely tired and sleepy. I did not want to write anything at all.
DE – one of people who asked me to explain myself – informed me that if I “persist” (in responding LH) he will think I’m trolling you (collectively).
For me it is pretty much an open declaration of war. NO “debate” is possible after that. Nothing to “preclude”.
And I don’t want to waste my time on warfare. I better just say what I said and quit the “debate”.
DE apologised, but I take the further discussion of trolling with Stu as a continuation.
No, I’m not offended by “cultural domination” etc. – that’s what we have been doing to Uzbeks and others, what I do maybe.
PS. The idea that I must be grateful to “polite attempts” (why “attempts”?) to explain the sentiments of L1 English speakers combined with indifference to my symmetrical sentiments and open hostility to my attempts to explain them is offensive.
But the offensive part is where you don’t like my explanations. Not where you think I’ll like yours. I do like them.
‘Why “attempts”‘ – why “tried”, that is. Sorry, can’t correct it anymore
I just understood something. I could not understand why, when I’m discussing WP, David – and then others – is discussing me personally and not just WP. And then behaving as if I don’t understnd/am insufficiently grateful to his explanation of what English speakers may think about my character. (what does this have to do with the articles in WP?). I understand it now:/
The very first iteration of DE’s explanation (to which as everyone thinks I react without due gratittude):
“It’s no use protesting that you, personally, don’t mean the word in that way (though I’m sure you don’t.) Language doesn’t work that way.”
He was resonding to mine:
“Why should I in my usage
(1) follow idiots who I don’t even know – if we are not discussing Renan – and
(2) then solemnly change it becasue they’re idiots?”
!!! I wrote “my usage”!!!
But fuck, I did NOT mean that I want to use this word and someone is not letting me!
No one here ever asked me to avoid it! I never asked for a permission in turn.
The words were my reaction at DE’s continued insistance that “Semitic peoples” (quotemarked: the label or rather the concept, not the referent) IS “Semitic race”.
I was telling that I don’t understand why I should internalise this idiocy. I don’t want to:/
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I understand that in everyone’s head it is “we’re explaining him why he should not use the word and he does not want to understand!”.
In my head it is “I’m explaining him why he should not try make me think of “Semitic peoples” as a racial concept”.
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Anyway, LH, I’m very sorry. I don’t apologise, but I definitely did not want it the way.
Thanks for explaining, and now that we understand each other (and hopefully understand that nobody was trying to insult or patronize anyone else) we can all move on to more productive things.
Unfortunately, no. I mean, I hope everyone will move on to more productive things, but it can’be fixed.
Everyone will keep thinking that what happened is a story about a foreiner who was told not to use the word Semites, and does not want to understand the explanation.
Eveyrone is so deep within this model, that even when I said that nothing like this is happened, that no one ever asked me to avoid the word, and I have no opinon of the word etc., DE just repeated the explanation oh what people will think of me “if I use it” – the explanation I understood and believed – and Y supported him, and Giacomo quite unambiguously explained that he understand what is going on in the spirit of this cliché.
For me it will remain a story of how DE was forcing the racial model of the world down my throat , doubled his efforts when I told it is unpleasant, and called me a troll when I kept “persisting” in explaining why it is unpleasant.
And the very fact that everyone thinks of what has happened the way everyone thinks – and no matter what I do everyone will keep thinking so – entails indifference to my feelings and an insult to me. I’m tired.
I don’t want to have anything to do with this. Dixi.
Now I will move on to more productive things eslewhere.
Just one more comment (which I too wrote two days ago, but now will reduce to a couple of lines). I hope it si more productive, but I don’t need a responce.
@JWB, I think Semitic speakers today would have liked the concept (or the term) more if they were united by a common religion even if they maintaned the cultural distance.
They would not have maintained it though. Ehtiopia is not “naturally” TOO different (though of course there are local cultrual isoglosses). The first Hijra was to Ethiopia and it was very well known in the semitic world. The degree of convergence – in the scenario where everyone has same religion can vary wildly . The degree of levelling brought about by Arab conquests was enormous (just compare Egypt to Yemen to Syria etc. – though Yemen is of course “exotic” for most Arabs from elsewhere). On the other hand, before the advent of Islam there already were distinct centers in the hellenised north (with numerous Сhristian neighbours, greeks in particular) and in Aksum (with Nubians etc.) Also Christians are good at schisms:-)
And the very fact that everyone thinks of what has happened the way everyone thinks – and no matter what I do everyone will keep thinking so – entails indifference to my feelings and an insult to me.
This is all in your head and reflects no external reality, but nobody can keep you from believing what you want to believe. It’s a little hard for me to understand how you can think that after hanging around here so long and having so many interactions, but if you need to feel insulted, have fun, I guess.
Just remembered one of those “Life games”, Kick Me. I don’t take that stuff seriously, but it is amusing and fast food for thought:
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Thesis: This is played by men whose social manner is equivalent to wearing a sign that reads “Please Don’t Kick Me.” The temptation is almost irresistible, and when the natural result follows, White cries piteously, “But the sign says ‘don’t kick me.’” Then he adds incredulously, “Why does this always happen to me?” (WAHM.). Clinically, the WAHM may be introjected and disguised in the “Psychiatry” cliché: “Whenever I’m under stress, I get all shook up.” One game element in WAHM comes from inverse pride: “My misfortunes are better than yours.” This factor is often found in paranoids.
If the people in this environment are restrained from striking at him by kindheartedness, “I’m Only Trying to Help You,” [by] social convention or organizational rules, his behavior becomes more and more provocative until he transgresses the limits and forces them to oblige. These are men who are cast out, the jilted and the job losers.
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@LH, yep.
Nevertheless you’re an exceptionally hospitable host, you are often very direct – and I totally appreciate that, and while we often misunderstand each other despite having so many things in common, you’re very willing to understand.
Also DE is an absolutely wonderful person. I’d be totally happy to meet him (preferably in Africa) some day, and he is someone who occasionaly makes me want to boast with such an acquitance before my freinds.
See also Magnus Pharao Hansen’s post on Uto-Aztecan bighorn sheep / meat / beans / nopales.
Thanks for linking to that blogpost from 2018, Y!
In his models 1–3 of semantic shifts among these words, Pharao Hansen indicates that the origin of nohpal- ‘nopal, cactus of the genus Opuntia’ is unknown. It is often proposed that nohpal- is somehow connected to a family of words including Tümpisa Shoshone napun, Cahuilla návet, Hopi naavu, etc.; see under na- 5 ‘prickly pear’ on p. 286 in Kenneth C. Hill (2020) ‘Wick Miller’s Uto-Aztecan Cognate Sets’ (available here) for a full list of proposed cognates. The preservation of Proto-Uto-Aztecan *p in various positions in Nahuan languages is a delicate matter, and I have always wondered how the etymology of nohpal- might work. However, it seems that some progress has been made on the -p- of nohpal-, perhaps by Pharao Hansen himself? The following is from a discussion a group of words meaning ‘to help’ in Nahuatl and its close relatives (Huichol pareevíiya, Cora vaɨhre) in Pharao Hansen (2024) ‘Sapir’s Law and the Role of Accent in the Reconstruction of Proto-Corachol-Nahuan’, International Journal of American Linguistics 90, nº 2, p. 249:
(That ‘thump-line’ should be ‘tump-line’. The tump in tumpline has an interesting etymology, too.) So nohpal- is from an earlier *napu-páɨre- ?
Also note the nō- in nōchtli ‘prickly pear fruit’, from earlier diminutive *napu-ci-? (Cf. tōchtli ‘rabbit’ apparently from *tapu-ci-; cf. Hill (2020: 485) ta- 30 ‘cottontail rabbit’: Tümpisa Shoshone tapun, Cahuilla távut, Hopi taavo, etc.)
Hill lists presumed reflexes of the protoform, but doesn’t discuss the historical linguistics at all. Stubbs (pp. 49–50, #7) goes into it in more detail, as usual leaving a lot of tantalizing open ends. His claimed connection with ‘alcohol’ is unconvincing to me.
To be clear, there are two p‘s here. The original PUA *p is reflected as /p/ or /v/ in Shoshone, Hopi, etc., and in Nahuatl as the “saltillo”, the /h/ of nohpalli, but is lost in noočtli. Alexis Manaster Ramer, in “The Search for the Sources of the Nahuatl Saltillo” (Anth. Ling. 37.1, 1, 1995; p. 8), argues that the following consonant determines the reflex of the *p. He reconstructs the root as PUA *naapït- ~ *naapot. That *p is separate from the p of the second morpheme, the one Hansen discusses.
“The first is the root *páɨre ‘instrument, pad-like shape’ (found as Nahuan pal in the words mekapalli ‘thump-line’ [lit. rope-tool],…”
I am guessing that word is related to the Mexican Spanish mecate, meaning short rope or cord.
“…nohpalli ‘cactus pad’, ma:kpalli ‘palm of hand’, tepalkatl ‘pot sherd’,…”
The last word is tepalcate in Mexican Spanish, with the same meaning.
“…and in Nahuatl as the “saltillo”, the /h/ of nohpalli, but is lost in noočtli.”
My guess is that noočtli is related to xoconoxtle or xoconostle? That’s the name my father used for a type of nopal that grew in my parent’s front yard. Shorter than other types with rounder leaves (pencas) and a sour fruit that’s used in moles. People use the name for that particular kind of tuna (nopal fruit) but my dad used the name for the entire plant as well.
Xococ ‘sour’ + nōchtli (using Karttunen’s spelling of Classical Nahuatl. I don’t know which dialect of Nahuatl is the source of the pan-Mexican Spanish borrowed Nahuatl vocabulary.)
And tuna is from Hispaniolan Taíno.