Arabic-L:LING:Ethnic Slurs responses

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 15 Jan 2002
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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-------------------------Directory-------------------------------------

1) Subject: Ethnic Slurs response
2) Subject: Ethnic Slurs response
3) Subject: Ethnic Slurs response
4) Subject: Ethnic Slurs response
5) Subject: Ethnic Slurs response

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1)
Date:  15 Jan 2002
From: mughazy <mughazy at students.uiuc.edu>
Subject: Ethnic Slurs response

[moderator's note: sorry about the weird characters.  I think the
message can still be read.  It has something to do with my program
not being able to decipher things.  Dil]

Dear Dan
In Egyptian Arabic, which I am most familiar with, there are not that many
ethnic slurs probably because the society is more stratified economically than
ethnically. There are of course some ethnic slurs, many of which are historic
and I would argue that some of them lost their use as ethnic derogatory terms
and maintained their use as insults. For example, “nawar” (the singular is
‘nawary’) is, as you mentioned, close in meaning to “white trash”, and it
might be related to the Nuweyr tribes in the Sudan (this is a wild guess).
Whatever its origin is people do not know it except maybe for a couple of
linguists. Other slurs such as ‘a9jami’ lost their use as slurs. I think that
word means ‘mute’ and it was used to refer to foreigners in generals (not just
Persians) because of their limited competence in Arabic, and later it was used
only to mean ‘foreigner’.

As far as I know in Jordanian Arabic the word ‘maSri’ (Egyptian) is used to
mean (of low or unknown descent i.e., bastrad)

I do not know of any publication on Arabic ethnic slurs, but if you are
interested here are some modern Egyptian ones, and I hope I am not offending
any of the list members.

-	‘hindi’ (Indian) and the plural is ‘hunuud’ or ‘hanadwa’.
This word is used
to mean ‘dumb’, ‘melodramatic’ or ‘oaf’. That is because of the Indian movies
that were extremely popular in Egypt in the seventies and eighties.

-	‘taiwaani’ (Taiwanese) which is used to mean ‘fake’ or ‘of
low quality’ as
in the most frequent use “esh-sheikh da da`noh taiwaani’ (This sheikh’s beard
is Taiwanese or made in Taiwan.) meaning he is not well-informed about
religion or he does not follow what he preaches. That is because of the
perception that the abundant made-in-Taiwan electronic products are of low
quality.

-	‘barabra’ which is used to refer to Nubians and not speakers
of Berber even
if the latter is the accurate etymology. It is used only to refer to bad
manner of speaking, namely for interlocutors to speak too fast and at the same
time.

-	‘toska’ which is an Italian woman’s name. It is used to mean
‘prostitute’ or
‘loose woman’ and it was common when many Europeans lived in Alexandria.

I would not list any of the fallaHeen (Delta peasants) or Sa3ayda (Upper
Egyptians) slurs because these are well known.

Some ethnic remarks are used only in frozen expressions or proverb-like
utterances such as
(a)	daakh dookhet el-baljeeki (he got as dizzy as someone from Belgium.)
(b)	el-menoofi el-aSeel zay el-gazma eT-TafSeel ‘a real menoofi (from
Menoofeyya, a district in the Delta) is like a custom made shoe. That
indicates their low status.
(c)	el-menoofi la yaloofi w-law akala laHma el-kitoofi. ‘a
menoofi will never
change even if he ate the shoulder meat of a lamb’ meaning they will always be
of low status. It is interesting that there are case marking vowels even on
the verb for the sake of the rhyme!!!
(d)	naTTa faranasaawi (a French jump) indicating a sexual intercourse. This
phrase lost its insulting use and is used only as a very rude remark about the
beauty of an Egyptian blonde particularly from el-manSoora where the French
soldiers of Napoleon stayed.

I hope these help your work, and I hope nobody is offended.

Mustafa A. Mughazy
Graduate student
Depatment of Linguistics
University of Illinois
Urbana Champaign

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2)
Date:  15 Jan 2002
From: Srpko Lestaric <srpkole at EUnet.yu>
Subject: Ethnic Slurs response

This subject promises to enrich our knowledge of Arabic with a good deal of
sometimes humorous and sometimes dirty words. Anyhow, if "9ajamii" for
"Persian" may be considered an ethnic slur -- and it is found in every
dialect of Arabic, not only spoken, but also in the classical written
language and MSA -- than "barbarii", on the other end of what we call the
Arab world, should be put in the same basket. Yet there is no need to hurry
with such conclusions: many peoples found no better names to give to their
first neighbors than "The Mutes", for the latter were unable to speak in an
intelligible way to them.

On the other hand, "ghajarii" is nowadays counted for an insult between the
Arabs ("nawar" is of the same branch, i.e. Gypsies) and different names of
this ethnic, in any of so-called great languages of the world, are
considered slurs in the respective societies. In Enno Littmann's Modern
Arabic Tales, Leiden, 1905 (translated to German by Littmann himself under
the title Arabische Maerchen aus muendlicher Ueberlieferung, Leipzig 1935,
and to Serbian by myself -- Antologija arapske narodne price, Vreme knjige,
Beograd, 1994) there is a folktale from Jerusalem (kayd al-nisaa' ghalab
kayd al-rijaal) in which a young man, entrapped in marriage with the
horribly handicapped judge's daughter, rescues himself by mere declaring
before his not destined father-in-low that he is remotely related with the
Gypsies.

It is possible, too, that zinjii/zanjii is being used as a slur, "pure"
racial, of course. In Syria and Lebanon "9abd" is still used for a Negro.

More than probable is that the Levantine Arabic today comprises quite a
number of "active" ethnic slurs on the account of the Jews (vice versa also
applies, to be sure). In an old Iraqi folktale (v. al-turaath al-sha9bii,
10/1975, p.117) I came across the noun/adjective "al-yahaadii", which seams
to me a clear pejorative (through the form of an augmentative).

In Iraq, the genuine Arab name of Abu Naajii still means either English(man)
or UK of Great Britain, sharply connotating political shrewdness of
(neo)colonialism. Therefore, this name, bearing the idea of salvation, is
sometimes paradoxically used to mark a corrupt man whose ways are dangerous
for others.

Srpko Lestaric

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3)
Date:  15 Jan 2002
From: Patricia Kelly Spurles <pkellyspurles at yahoo.com>
Subject: Ethnic Slurs response

In urban women's language of Marrakesh, "yahudi" (Jew)
is used pejoratively to refer to non-Jews.

"Gawri" (foreigner, fr "kafir" via Turkish, I suppose)
also has pejorative connotations for some, and is
avoided by some speakers. It reminds me of the
confusion in the US over politically correct terms of
reference for African Americans.

=====
Patricia Kelly Spurles

PhD candidate
Dept. d'anthropologie, Univ. de Montreal

300 East Shelbourne Dr., apt. 73
Normal, Illinois 61761

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4)
Date:  15 Jan 2002
From: "Schub, Michael" <michael.schub at trincoll.edu>
Subject: Ethnic Slurs response

  One Arab author of Kurdish origin (Ahmad Amin[??]) was abashed when he
was referred to as having a  /ra's  kurdi/ ("Kurdish head").

                                                   Mike Schub

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5)
Date:  15 Jan 2002
From: Neal Kaloupek <NKaloupek at compuserve.com>
Subject: Ethnic Slurs response

I hesitate somewhat to talk about these things for fear of offending
someone - however, I lived at the border between the UAE and Oman for
seven years, and was told that Egyptians were sometimes referred to
as "Himaar" (donkey) - (possibly because in the past they did the
manual labor?) Also, I heard those from the Levant called "zelemy"
(as in "He first spoke like a 'zelemy', but now he's learned to speak
better") - probably because Levantines use the term more frequently
than "Gulfies" use it.

Neal

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End of Arabic-L:  15 Jan 2002
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