[Ads-l] ethnocide (1944)

[Shapiro, Fred]

Very interesting, Ben.

Another interesting point about the word "genocide," I believe, is that the word was defined by Lemkin to exclude political murders, as a sop to the Soviet Union (which was responsible for many political murders) in order to gain Soviet support for a genocide convention.

Fred Shapiro


________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Ben Zimmer [bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2014 4:03 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: ethnocide (1944)

OED3 (Mar. 2014 update) has "ethnocide" from 1968. But it appears in a
footnote in the same 1944 book that introduced "genocide."

1944 R. Lemkin _Axis Rule in Occupied Europe_ ix 79 Another term could
be used for the same idea, namely, _ethnocide_, consisting of the
Greek word "ethnos" -- nation -- and the Latin word "cide."
http://books.google.com/books?id=y0in2wOY-W0C&pg=PA79

(Lemkin treated "ethnocide" as a synonym for "genocide," though later
writers would create a distinction between the two terms.)

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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