yhemusa
What are the alternate words for oriental? Dictionaries say that using an oriental to refer to someone coming from China or Japan is not polite, why so? And this use seems not to be rare in today's English( some of it is done by ' the orientals" ourselves ;), and not seem to be suggestiong racism, to my eyes. What do you think about this problem? If it does mean discrimination someway, are there any alternate words for it?
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الإجابات · 9
1
Oriental is still not uncommon in the UK, but if you were to say it in the US then it's almost a racial slur, which is largely due to the history of the word. 'Oriental' on its own was never intended to have a negative meaning, but because people used to use the term when talking about how different or strange Asian people were it gained a racist connotation. Consider the term 'Jap'. It seems innocent enough because it's just a shortened form of 'Japanese', but during World War II Americans referred to Japanese people as 'Japs'. Because Japan was the enemy of the US, 'Jap' therefore became a word of hate throughout the country, and these days it is considered very offensive to call someone a Jap. These days, it's acceptable to use 'oriental' as an adjective when talking about objects, like a rug or some food, but never a person. To be on the safe side, I'd just not use it at all.
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The original meaning of oriental means anything east of Europe. It was first used to denote people or things from Middle East, such as "oriental rugs", "oriental studies" However, as time went by when lands extended further east, the term no longer applies to these no longer "eastern" lands but all the way to the "world's end". Here's some info as a racial slur... http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-tsuchiyama-oriental-insult-20160601-snap-story.html
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"Asian."
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I don't think, as a Chinese, I don't feel uncomfortable with the word , as we often say westerners or europeans
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yhemusa
المهارات اللغوية
العربية, الصينية (المندرية), الصينية (الكانتونية), الإنجليزية, الفرنسية, الألمانية, اليابانية, الروسية, الإسبانية
لغة التعلّم
الإنجليزية, الروسية