Arabic-L:LING:mores ethnic slurs responses

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Wed 16 Jan 2002
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: hindi
2) Subject: ethnic slurs response

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1)
Date:  16 Jan 2002
From: Waheed Samy <wasamy at umich.edu>
Subject: hindi

>  - '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.

My feeling is that hindi refers to North American (Red Indians), not
Asian Indians.  I think this sense came from old American Westerns,
which used to depict cowboys as smart, and Indians as dumb.

Waheed

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2)
Date:  16 Jan 2002
From: Neal Kaloupek <NKaloupek at compuserve.com>
Subject: ethnic slurs response

Now that I think a little more about it, I think that in the part of the
Gulf where I lived donkeys were called "miSri", rather than Egyptians in
general being called "Himaar" (although of course any individual, of any
nationality, could be called "Himaar" by someone who didn't like him!) Sorry
for the mixup!

Negroid people also are sometimes called "9abd" in the Gulf as well (at
least at the Oman / UAE border where I was), as mentioned by Srpko Lestaric
about Syria and Lebanon.

Neal Kaloupek

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End of Arabic-L:  16 Jan 2002