Even Greener Pastures

Hi everyone!

I thought about asking this question on itаlki but something tells me it might not be politically correct... so I was just wondering, maybe someone here knows the answer?

In a book I'm reading at the moment there is this line:

This was hardly what Margaret Thatcher had in mind when she visited Peking in September 1982 to decide the future of Hong Kong. Buoyed up with the afflatus of victory over Argentinians, she was in no mood to be dictated by "Chinamen" — a term she was eventually persuaded to drop.

My question is, why was she persuaded to drop the term? Is it offensive in some way? I must say I've never seen this kind of word formation in English (country name + "men") before, but it's pretty normal in some other languages.

[For example, in Chinese itself you use this scheme pretty much all the time: a Chinese person would be 中国人 (zhōngguórén), 人 means "person", 中国 by itself means "China" (lit. "Central Country"; 国 stands for "country") — and, say, "a foreigner" would be 外国人 (wàiguórén, "foreign country person"). Actually, you can even hear people referring to the Chinese language not as 汉语 (hànyǔ, hàn as in "Han people") but as 中国话 (zhōngguóhuà) — there's even a lovely song with this name by S.H.E. (but don't google the lyrics — I've just read that, apparently, some people find the song chauvinistic]

So, back to the question: why can't you say "Chinamen"? Do you think the term has negative connotations? If yes, do you know when it became offensive then, before or after 1982?

It's very, very outdated. It sounds like something from the 1930s, and smacks of a colonial-style 'Oh those funny little foreign chaps'. 

Here's my experience of 'Chinaman'. Not long ago, I used the word to refer to someone, in a slightly jokey, mock-old-fashioned way.  My kids looked at me in horror, and said 'Mother, you CANNOT say that word'. 

I came across the word "Chinaman" in The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. A large part of the novel is set in the 1930s.
Miss Kenton and Mr Stevens are discussing "Chinamen" as objects (presumably statues?) and where they should be placed.

"Mr Stevens, I have just noticed something outside which puzzles me."
"What is that, Miss Kenton?"
"Was it his lordship's wish that the Chinaman on the upstairs landing should be exchanged with the one outside this door?"
"The Chinaman, Miss Kenton?"
...
"The Chinamen, I would suppose, were polished by someone then replaced incorrectly."

I felt there was a playfulness to the expression but didn't know how politically incorrect it would be considered these days.

What about the word "Englishman"? How do people from England feel about it these days?

I've heard the word Chinaman exactly once in my life: in the Lover (the film version of Marguerite Duras' novel; the novel was written in French, but the movie was in English). It sounded rather derogatory. The story takes place in Indochina (i.e. Vietnam), and the main characters are a young French girl (fifteen and half, as she says) from a poor family and very rich Chinese man about twice her age. They both have contempt for each other (she for him because he's Chinese, and he for her because she's (a) white and (b) poor). But they're also attracted to each other and the movie (like the novel that it's based on) is about their sexual relationship. Anyway, at some point, they talk about what would happen if her family found out, and she gives a kind of contemptuous smirk and says "With a Chinaman!" Anyway, I figured it wasn't a word that I should use.

@Alharacas, lol, "слона-то я и не приметил"! (с) Thanks a lot for the link!
@everyone, thank you all for your answers and examples!

Careful, Jerry. They might give you sour looks.

We call Germans Němci. This is not considered derogatory, it's the standard term for a German person, although němý = mute. Does anyone else have a name for another country or their citizen that used to have negative connotations but has become neutral?

You're doing this on purpose, aren't you, Kseniia? As if we stupid monoglot anglophones don't feel small enough as it is, you keep dropping in these jaw-dropping English words, cool as anything.

I knew what ethnopaulism meant. Of course I did. I've heard it millions of times before. I haven't just copied, pasted and googled it at all.

@Kseniia

Yes, we say "Židé" when we mean the nation, and we use lower case "ž" in "židé" when we mean the religion. I have also found the word "Hebrejec" but I haven't really seen it used. The word "Židé" has no negative connotations. You'd have to add a negative-sounding suffix to it to achieve that. It comes from the Old Italian Giudio that comes from the Latin Iudaeus (a person from Judea). So does the Polish Źyd, apparently.

So you say "евреи" when referring to the nation. According to Wikipedia, you call the followers of Judaism "Иудеи", would you agree?

Here is the full list of Jewish ethnonyms:

I knew what ethnopaulism meant. Of course I did. I've heard it millions of times before. I haven't just copied, pasted and googled it at all.

I called her on this last week. Clearly she's doing it to aggravate and demean us.

@Kseniia

How did the word for "Sunday" and "not doing anything" end up meaning "a week"? I can't get my head around it.

SuKi, well I'm not the one to blame! I picked this word in the article Aliph mentioned - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs . Why do you monoglot anglophones use it in Wikipedia then?
(...)
I don't like the word "slur", it sounds weird.

I don’t like this word either. Looked it up on the dictionary before posting the link. It sounds so much like another derogatory word used to define a woman who has several sexual partners.

@Nikola, oh, my first reaction was to answer "magic!", but it's even more interesting: "Christianity" + "something lost — or, rather, acquired — in translation"

Just to be clear, this is how it works in Russian today (we use different suffixes but the original meaning is easy to guess):

Monday: понедельник (ponedél'nik) ~ after "недели" + suffix
Tuesday: вторник (vtórnik) ~ second + suffix
Wednesday: среда (sredá) ~ (cf. середина, средина = middle)
Thursday: четверг (četvérg) ~ fourth + suffix
Friday: пятница (p'átnica) ~ five (or fifth, it's not clear) + suffix
Saturday: суббота (subbóta) ~ Sabbath
Sunday: воскресенье (voskresén'je) ~ (cf. воскресение = resurrection)
Week: неделя (nedél'a) ~ "not doing anything"

[I think apart from воскресенье and неделя it's all quite similar in Czech, isn't it?]

Now, it's pretty clear who is responsible for воскресенье: there were not too many institutions that could introduce the word with the meaning "resurrection (of Christ)". As for неделя, there is some evidence that in Russian the word had had both meanings ("week" and "Sunday") from the very beginning, i.e. since it was coined. Knowing that in Macedonian and Bulgarian — which is important because Saints Cyril (Constantine) and Methodius who are credited with inventing the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets and who translated the Bible into the language now known as Old Church Slavonic were either Macedonians or Bulgarians — неделя used to have both these meanings, too. Some explain it by the fact that in Greek (and Cyril and Methodius used the Greek version of the Bible, of course) there was the same story with σάββατα (σάμβατον): it was used both for "Sabbath" and for "week". So, when someone decided it was a good idea to make the name of Sunday more Christian in Russian, the other meaning of неделя just died. RIP.

By the way, there is in fact a term for "week" that makes a little more sense: седмица (sedmítsa; ~ seven (more like a collective numeral) + suffix). Do we use it in Russian? No, not really, but it's part of relatively "modern" Church Slavonic so you can hear this word during religious services in some Orthodox Churches.

@Sofia

I think the concept of other nations/tribes (than yours) being a bit silly or uncivilised used to be very common across the world. Some people might still feel this way nowadays. I guess it's one of the many skeletons in a nation's closet. What puzzles me, though, is that people would choose one country that's "muter" than others.

The explanation I found was as follows: while there was/is a certain degree of mutual intelligibilty among speakers of Slavic languages, when faced with speakers of Germanic languages, this intelligibilty completely stopped - well, stops. So, it does make sense, doesn't it? If you can sort of communicate with all of your neighbours to the North, East and South, but once you go West, you get those weird people with an utterly unrecognizable language - that must mean they're kind of mute.

@Kseniia

Thank you for the thorough explanation. So the term was ambiguous for quite some time and the same had happened with Saturday. It just occurred to me that the reason for having the same word for a day of the week and the whole week could be that weeks were once counted in Saturdays or Sundays. "It happened three Sundays ago." This is where the ambiguity might have come from. It's similar to the Czech "léto" (summer) and "pět let" (five years). A year is normally "rok" but you would say "let" if the number is over four. I have a feeling you have something similar in Russian.

That makes a lot more sense than the airy "Oh, it's just that singular and plural are different for rok" I got. Thanks!

BTW, here are a few bits from a discussion on duolingo (link below):
"Originally both rok and lato have nothing to do with time measure. The first was etymologically linked with rzec (to speak). In old-Polish rok was understood as a lawsuit. In the most cases it was done to postpone payment for 12 months. Hence we get rok as time measure.
Lato [summer] was understood more broadly than today as a period other than winter, when agricultural works can be done. (Now it is one of the 4 seasons of a year.) This form later was extended to cover all the year. With time the regular plural form lata spread."
"Interestingly though, when I looked into Proto-Indo-European roots for "year," I found the word "lehto." "Lehto" obviously turned into "leto" and, further, "lata." So, everyone used some form of "lehto" for year until something else evolved or was borrowed, but the Slavs seem to have held on to this ancient word."

Yes, we say "Židé" when we mean the nation, and we use lower case "ž" in "židé" when we mean the religion. I have also found the word "Hebrejec" but I haven't really seen it used. The word "Židé" has no negative connotations. You'd have to add a negative-sounding suffix to it to achieve that. It comes from the Old Italian Giudio that comes from the Latin Iudaeus (a person from Judea). So does the Polish Źyd, apparently.

Nowadays the word giudeo is considered offensive in Italian (it's the term that was used during the Fascist era). Ebreo is the acceptable term.

Quote from: Nikola on March 13, 2019, 06:17:55 pm

Yes, we say "Židé" when we mean the nation, and we use lower case "ž" in "židé" when we mean the religion. I have also found the word "Hebrejec" but I haven't really seen it used. The word "Židé" has no negative connotations. You'd have to add a negative-sounding suffix to it to achieve that. It comes from the Old Italian Giudio that comes from the Latin Iudaeus (a person from Judea). So does the Polish Źyd, apparently.

Nowadays the word giudeo is considered offensive in Italian (it's the term that was used during the Fascist era). Ebreo is the acceptable term.

Coligno, SuKi (and everybody else, of course), what would it sound like in English if somebody called a jewish person "Hebrew" these days? I'm just wondering because it seems a bit strange that the word Jude hasn't been replaced in German. I mean, we tend to avoid the word by using some sort of different construction with the adjective jüdisch instead. For instance, a publisher would probably try to change a book's title from "Juden in Europa heute" (if that's what had been suggested by the author) to something like "Jüdisches Leben in Europa heute", but it's definitely not considered taboo. And Hebräer would just sound weird, unless you were talking about a member of a tribe in biblical times.
I remember coming across "Hebrew" in George Eliot's "Daniel Deronda" and being quite bewildered by it (I was a teenager at the time). I think it took a while, or I may have had to ask my aunt in order to understand it meant Jew/jewish.

This is what wiktionary says under
"Gelegentlich wird die Bezeichnung Jude, Jüdin wegen der Erinnerung an den nationalsozialistischen Sprachgebrauch als diskriminierend empfunden. In diesen Fällen werden dann meist Formulierungen wie jüdische Menschen, jüdische (Mitbürgerinnen und) Mitbürger oder Menschen jüdischen Glaubens gewählt."
Roughly translated: Sometimes, the words Jew, Jewess (?) are felt to be discriminatory because of their use in Nazi times. In those cases, a different wording like jewish people, jewish citizens or people of jewish faith is chosen instead.