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IpseDixit wrote:For the longest time, I would cringe when hearing Americans use the word "race" very nonchalantly. That's because its Italian counterpart - razza - is a very taboo word. Nobody would dare use it the same way Americans do without sounding like a racist nutjob.
IpseDixit wrote:For the longest time, I would cringe when hearing Americans use the word "race" very nonchalantly. That's because its Italian counterpart - razza - is a very taboo word. Nobody would dare use it the same way Americans do without sounding like a racist nutjob. I'm not sure but I suppose this has to do a lot with Fascist Racial Laws which are still relatively fresh in the collective memory of the country. Nowadays, most people would use the word origine instead.
Another word that would make me cringe is "to deport"/"deportation". In Italian, this is used only in the context of ethnic cleansing. I think to most people, deportazione usually conjures up images of Jewish people being transferred to Auschwitz. So, at first, it was quite disturbing to see American media use it in the context of undocumented immigrants living in the USA. The word we would use in that context is rimpatriare / rimpatrio.
Do you have other examples?
Car wrote:For the former, the translation really depends on what you mean with it (if it's just skin colour, you'd use Hautfarbe), the latter is Abschiebung.
TheStrayCat wrote:One example that comes to my mind is the word żyd/žid/жид. In Western Slavic languages it is the normative word referring to the Jewish people, in Russian (and most varieties of Ukrainian since the 20th century) it is an ethnic slur.
HEY YOU!
As you walk around, you'll hear young people shouting out 'Hey you!' or 'Peace!' (the latter often sounds more like 'piss'). They find this particularly amusing since in Burmese yù (ရူး ) means 'mad' or 'insane'. This could be your first introduction to the Burmese love of punning.
linguoboy wrote:Car wrote:For the former, the translation really depends on what you mean with it (if it's just skin colour, you'd use Hautfarbe), the latter is Abschiebung.
In USAmerican usage, "race" is not reducible to skin colour. It's possible to have "Black" people who are lighter skinned than many "White" people.
vijayjohn wrote:I've noticed that a lot of Europeans seem to consider fuck less offensive than people in Anglophone North America do. I'm not sure whether it's only non-native speakers of English or not, though. (By contrast, I don't recall ever seeing this attitude among Indians). I know some Dutch-speakers who say they have no problem with using or hearing swearwords in English but would take offense on some level at hearing swearwords in Dutch. This sort of effect is perhaps more obvious with bro, a term that native English-speakers seem more likely to associate with frat boys than non-native speakers are.
Car wrote:linguoboy wrote:Car wrote:For the former, the translation really depends on what you mean with it (if it's just skin colour, you'd use Hautfarbe), the latter is Abschiebung.
In USAmerican usage, "race" is not reducible to skin colour. It's possible to have "Black" people who are lighter skinned than many "White" people.
I didn't say it was. Hence why I wrote "the translation really depends on what you mean with it".
linguoboy wrote:Car wrote:linguoboy wrote:Car wrote:For the former, the translation really depends on what you mean with it (if it's just skin colour, you'd use Hautfarbe), the latter is Abschiebung.
In USAmerican usage, "race" is not reducible to skin colour. It's possible to have "Black" people who are lighter skinned than many "White" people.
I didn't say it was. Hence why I wrote "the translation really depends on what you mean with it".
The point is that I can't think of a context where NA English race could ever be accurately translated as Hautfarbe. These are really two entirely different (albeit related) concepts.
vijayjohn wrote:Yeah, there's a whole range of them here because different people seem to take different levels of offense at them, I guess. For instance, when I was growing up, we would definitely get in trouble at school if we were caught saying damn or hell (let alone fuck and shit!), or even darn, which is the sort of reason why dang, shoot, and heck exist. But then I think some people think even dang, shoot, and/or heck are "bad words."
vijayjohn wrote:I remember the first time I was a teaching assistant, the prof was teaching an introductory linguistics course, but even though there's a part of the textbook that has to do with cursing and linguistic taboos, the only kind of cursing he was okay with discussing in class was the pejoration of religious terminology in Quebec French. He insisted that some students get offended otherwise.
Ciarán12 wrote: damn and hell are almost too weak to be used here, and as for the rest, they are not even words to us.
They sound so twee and weak that they would have the opposite effect completely - instead of sounding angry or aggressive you'd sound completely ridiculous.
We must sound like pirates or something to you people.
To me that just seems like people can't be adults about what are, at the end of the day, just words. If you can't even discuss them in a sterilized sense as objects of study...
vijayjohn wrote:Well, of course; I think only Americans ever use the other ones. If my understanding is correct, they're all euphemisms we developed; in fact, I was kind of trying to point out how absurd it was that first, Americans(?) developed darn as a euphemism for damn, and then Americans apparently developed dang as a euphemism for the euphemism because the existing euphemism was not already euphemistic enough.
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