Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Are you actually from the Caucasus, like Georgia, Armenia, etc, or do you use the word to mean "European or descendent of Europeans"? Because the USA likes to use the word to mean European-like, which is incorrect, as the caucasus is a very specific region in the border of Europe and Asia.
You're right about where the Caucasus is, but the generally accepted meaning - both in the US and Europe - is white European ancestry, not just those from the Caucasus.
I am from Europe, and fluent in several European languages. In all of those Caucasian means person from the Caucasus. The usage to mean European is exclusively an USA thing.
Thank you for your assumption that I am not, in fact, European.
However, given I'm from one of the few European countries that speak English as their primary language, I can categorically say you're wrong.
Alright, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Link me to a dictionary of your country's version of English that lists "caucasian" with the exclusive meaning of "European or descendent of Europeans", or something to that effect.
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=caucasian+meaning
Oh wow, that first result sure does say exactly that
Edit: interestingly, lmgtfy actually gets a different response to googling it directly in the UK for me 🤔
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/caucasian#:~:text=Caucasian%20in%20British%20English&text=adjective-,1.,noun
Not a dictionary, thus not a credible source.
Let me help you out:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
"The Caucasian race is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. [...] In the United States, the root term Caucasian is still in use as a synonym for white or of European, Middle Eastern, or North African ancestry, a usage that has been criticized."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
I understand why you might think Caucasian to mean something else despite person from the Caucasus despite being European: the US version of English is influential, due to the size of the country and the popularity of their media. Some British people have started saying "TV series" instead of "programme", for example, due to the influence of the US. You probably heard and read the adjective almost always in the incorrect US usage, because a) other nations don't obsess over ethnicity and b) the actual Caucasus not exactly being a common topic in the media. Hence, when you do hear the word, it is used the way the USA does, incorrectly.
I additionally linked to the specifically British edition of Collins as well for your benefit, which is, in fact, a dictionary. Seriously, trust me, if you go up to 5 Brits and ask them what Caucasian means, they will almost certainly all answer "white".
Wikipedia, also, is not a dictionary.
It's also pretty damn rude to classify the American usage as "incorrect", you're not the arbiter of what "real" English is.
Well, they're wrong. The Caucasus is where Georgia, Armenia and other countries are. Caucasians are people from the Caucasus.
Another academic source: "White, European, Western, Caucasian, or what? Inappropriate labeling in research on race, ethnicity, and health." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1509085
There is more: "Though discredited as an anthropological term and not recommended in most editorial guidelines, it is still heard and used, for example, as a category on forms asking for ethnic identification. It is also still used for police blotters (the abbreviated Cauc may be heard among police) and appears elsewhere as a euphemism. Its synonym, Caucasoid, also once used in anthropology but now dated and considered pejorative, is disappearing."
https://books.google.com/books?id=_hZHAAAAMAAJ
The United States National Library of Medicine discontinued usage in favor of the more narrow geographical term European, which traditionally only applied to a subset of Caucasoids. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd03/nd03_med_data_changes.html
What happened to "show me one dictionary"?
Looks like your goalposts have grown legs.
So, the common usage in both the country with the greatest number of English speakers AND the country the language originated in is incorrect? Because crispy_kilt says so?
Language is a socially negotiated system, so what the word means to the people who use it is what the words mean.
That paper is about what terminology should be used in academic work, who gives a fuck for people talking on lemmy?
The scale of annoyingness:
Pedants -> incorrect pedants -> incorrect pedants who insist they're right, regardless of the evidence in front of them
----------------------------------------------------| you are here
I was honestly surprised with it listing the term with its common, but incorrect meaning, without as much as a hint to that end. You got me there!
No. Please refer to the three academic sources I provided.
That's like arguing "could of" to be correct English just because some people do it. Correctness is thankfully not what some believe, but something that has to be demonstrated with some rigour. If you discredit academic sources in favour of a popular misconception then I guess we will never agree.
I mean, I provided several sources for my claim
But your sources have multiple flaws:
So my source - despite being a highly reputable entity whose entire reason to exist is to define words - is "incorrect"?
"Could of" is different, because the social consensus is that it's grammatically incorrect. Your argument is more like arguing that antisemitic refers to Arabs as well, just because Semitic includes Arabic peoples. Just because a term is derived from another doesn't mean that it permanently must only be understood by its etymological roots.
Of course they're all from the US, they're the only ones who use the word that way. They're also the only ones obsessed with the ethnic origin of the various parts of their population. In England, a person with UK citizenship whose ancestors came from Africa 300 years ago isn't an African-Englishman, or a Black English, or some other racist bullshit like that, he's simply an Englishman. That's because the British aren't unhealthily obsessed with ethnic origin.
This of course makes it difficult to find UK examples of the correct usage of the term, as this whole topic doesn't really exist in a civilised nation.
Earlier we talked about European languages. I speak some of them.
French: Caucasien: Qui appartient au Caucase, chaîne de montagnes d’Asie. (Who is from the Caucasus, a chain of mountains in Asia.) https://www.le-dictionnaire.com/definition/caucasien
German: Kaukasier: Einwohnerbezeichnung (term for describing inhabitant) https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Kaukasier
Russian: кавказец: Жители, уроженцы Кавказа. (Inhabitant or native of the Caucasus) https://kartaslov.ru/%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5-%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0/%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B7%D1%86%D1%8B
See? One example from the most spoken language in Europe of each group, Latin, Germanic, Slavic.
They all agree.
Do you think the concept of race doesn't exist in Britain?!
I'll tell you it most definitely does, hell we practically invented systemic racism. Come to London and tell a black Brit that they aren't black and we'll see how that one goes down.
Just because words that look like "Caucasian" mean the other thing in German and french doesn't change it's English meaning. Congratulations on your language knowledge, but are not the genius you think you are.
I speak English, as an Englishman. Caucasian means white in British English.
Right then, you Caribbean. What do you mean you're not from the Caribbean? What does that have to do with anything? That word is obviously referring to the population of the British Isles. Duh.
That's how this sounds. It's ridiculous.
Well yeah that would be a great metaphor, if everyone in Britain referred to Britain as the Carribbean. But they don't, so it's deeply dumb.
I don't understand what you're caught up on.
British people use the word caucasian to mean white, and that is documented in British dictionaries.
I appreciate you take personal issue with that usage, but that's life, you don't control the English language.
A misconception being common does not make it correct.
It reads like op used the common American euphemism for 'white'. Which is the correct usage as he's addressing an American audience.
That's right, but I wasn't aware of this either. Thanks for correcting me.
The usage of the word as it is common in the USA is incorrect. OP might not be aware of this, hence my comment.
Do you know why US-americans don't use the appropriate word "European"? I've always wondered. They do say African, Asian, Latino, but not European, to describe ethnic origins.
Etymological prescriptivism is not really a tenable point in linguistics. You can argue that, for instance, in American English the Dutch word 'rekening' (bill) is abused as reckoning. And you can find literally thousands of examples like that.
I'm this case a non native speaker used the American English vernacular correctly. You argue that the word is used incorrectly in this vernacular, and it is very peculiar and steeped in the racial discourse of the country. However it's usage was correct in this case.
I mean, sure, you Japanese person you. No silly, being called Japanese has nothing to do with being from Japan, why would you even think that?
You are not adressing my argument at all and being obtuse.
I am trying to demonstrate how absurd it is to use the demonym for one region of the world to refer to the inhabitants of a completely different part of the world
I understand that, and I don't dispute that either. I only point out that that is how language works. Your free to discuss the intricacies and weirdness of how that term became to mean that.
However you can't berate a language user (certainly a non native speaker) for using the term in it's connotation. It's like shaming someone calling the Magyar people 'Hungarian'.
It all started with a dude looking at skulls, he saw one that was the most symmetrical, the best looking skull he ever saw. He decided it must belong to a white European, as they are the best people (/s). He finds out that the skull was that of a person from the Caucus mountains.
Caucasian has been used to describe the ‘superior’ white Europeans since. So, OP is using the word correctly really. They say African, Asian, Latino because those are other races… with unpleasant skulls.
This is a gross oversimplification, but one of the modern excuses for racism and race superiority. Also, why ‘Caucasian’ is used to say white European.
Two reasons spring to mind: