WORDSPEAK
Slurs of an `ethnic' kind
ANAND
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How `ethnic' changed from meaning `heathen' to `racial, cultural or national minority group'.
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THE column about dislogistic terms (December 2006), inspired by VS Naipaul calling Tony Blair a "cultural vandal", meant to discuss something that had been niggling me. Enthusiastic response by readers warranted its sequel last month. Even greater response to the history of words like assassin and villain made it appear as if I had — like the Greek mythological figure Pandora — opened a box, spilling out questions and doubts sent by readers but not, thankfully, evils that Pandora had stored in her box. Owing to readers' interest, the next columns will deal with some of their questions and opinions in detail.
Sophisticated dislogistic (critical, disapproving, judgemental and derogatory) terms came out of swearing and cursing. Imagine the pre-historic man expressing such emotions as hatred, frustration, surprise and rage upon slipping on animal faeces in jungle or stubbing his toe against a rock or to vent anger when some animal he was hunting escaped.
These, after man discovered communicable speech, probably formed the first mutually recognisable words. Such words began to be considered as insults, profanities and obscenities only when decreed so by social etiquette and religious considerations. Since such etiquette varied from one culture to another, so did the pattern of swearing. Socrates is said to have sworn ni ton kuna `By the dog' and Pythagoras ma tin tetrakton `By the number four.' Some intrepid researcher can come up with examples from Indian history.
What Socrates and Pythagoras uttered were mild expletives. Serious invective involving taboo words is still mostly written by using asterisks for vowels, or the first letter followed by a dash or in characters on the top row of the keyboard typed out by depressing the shift key.
Roots
Dislogistic terms such as Vandals, Goths and Huns discussed in the previous two columns were ethnic slurs, which is the focus of this column. These ethnic slurs originated among the people of Christendom, in Romance languages and were passed on to English. Other languages also have ethnic slurs, as an examination of such terms as feringhi and kafir will show. English ethnic slurs became most common and widely used because of the global hegemony of the language. A.A. Rodack coined `ethnophaulism', a term for ethnic slurs (from Greek phaulos `ugly'), in the subtitle of his authoritative Dictionary of International Slurs (1944).
Ethnic is a lexeme (a unit of meaning, headword in a dictionary) with an interesting history. It first appeared in English around the 14th century; it came from Greek ethnikos, heathen, derived from ethnos, nation. It meant the same in English as it did in Greek, and it was applied indiscriminately to anyone who was not a Christian or a Jew, or one not acknowledging the God of Christianity, Judaism and, interestingly, Islam. Milton wrote: "No better reported than impure ethnic and lay dogs." Thomas Carlyle used it in 1851 in his Life of John Sterling as: "I find at this time his religion is as good as altogether Ethnic, Greekish, what Goethe calls the Heathen form of religion". The Webster Dictionary of 1913 defined ethnic as `heathen, pagan', although noting that this usage might be obsolete.
Current shape
The use of ethnic in the sense of "peculiar to a race or nation" began to take shape around 1851. It now pertains to or is characteristic of a people, esp. a group sharing a common and distinctive culture, religion, language, or the like. Its use for "different cultural groups" was in 1935; and for "racial, cultural or national minority group" in American English in 1945. Ethnicity is from 1953. In his statement "Influenced by ethnic and cultural ties", J.F. Kennedy used it to mean denoting or deriving from or distinctive of the ways of living built up by a group of people. Ethnic cleansing is from 1991, as a result of the war in Serbia.
It's important to note here that ethnic slurs originating in Christendom were out of xenophobic mistrust of non-Christians. Language is the strongest symbol (even stronger than religion) of a community, cultural group or nation. Sociologists assert that "nowhere does the issue of personal linguistic identity emerge more strongly than in relation to questions of ethnicity and nationhood. Ethnic identity is allegiance to the group with which one has ancestral links. In the 18th and 19th centuries, in particular, linguistic nationalism was a dominant European movement, with languages seen as the primary outward sign of a group's identity." Ethnic slurs serve as a marker of group identity and solidarity.
As societies change, so do languages. More than `sound shifts' or grammatical changes, semantic changes are profoundly connected with the life, literature and culture of a community. Ethnic underwent a type of semantic change called `amelioration' where a word loses an original sense of disapproval. Another good example is `mischievous' which lost its strong sense of `disastrous', and now means the milder `playfully annoying'. Opposite of this is the semantic change `pejoration', where a word develops a sense of disapproval, as was the case of `villain' discussed in the previous column, which originally meant a "farm labourer" but now means "a bad person who harms other people or breaks the law".
Next: Lexical histories of pagan, heathen, feringhi and suchlike.
E-mail: anand@journalist.com
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