Musings on Language #2

[Yora]

I think it also matters what aspect of a person you are referring to.

You could easily say "black people face discrimination in the US". Because it is completele irrelevant what ethnic group, what social background, or what nationality the person has. The thing that triggers discrimination is the dark skin color. This is something that affects all people with that skin color equally, so it is appropriate to refer to them by that trait.
However, it would be wrong to say that "Africans face discrimination in the US". White South Africans are not affected by this type of discrimination and most black people in America are american nationals, not citizens of an African country.
It would equally be misleading to say "African-Americans face discrimination". Yes they do, but so do all black people even if they are not Americans.

In Germany we still call them Indians, but that might have something to do that we have different words for native americans and the people of India, which are Indianer and Inder respectively. No chance for a mix-up, both are clearly defined and completely seperate groups.

However, for some reason the German word for Gypsies seems to be not acceptable. Though I think it can be said that the term Zigeuner is completely tied to an image of nomads with horse carts. Which these peoples no longer are since a long time. Maybe it was an attempt to get rid of the Stereotype by getting rid of the term.
Not that it really helped, since every time someone asks "To what people does this term refer to?", the answer is just "That's the new word for Zigeuner".



English manged to get rid of gramatical gender. And I really want to know how they did it! In German, gender has almost zero value of information. If you have complex sentence in which the subject and the object are of different gender, there is a small help when it comes to determining to which one something in another part of the sentence refers to.
But German does alrady have case-sensitive articles that exist to give 100% accurate information on this. It only helps when you have an extremely convoluted sentence and object and subject have different gender. Which really doesn't justify the massive amount of time it takes to learn all the articles three times and to learn the gender of every single noun.

That's why I love Japanese. It's incredibly optimized in that aspect. Though then they decided to make a huge deal of which words and phrases are appropriate for the speakers social status.
But the grammar is simple!