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Thread: Are Europeans universally considered "white"?

  1. #1
    Stegodon kk fusion's avatar
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    Default Are Europeans universally considered "white"?

    In all indigenous languages I've checked, the term used to describe people of European descent is the same as for the color white.

    There are things which are definitely lighter than human skin, but those are not labeled as white in any language. What is the mechanism behind the Caucasian = White perception? Are there exceptions among the world's natural languages?

  2. #2
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    Sorry for giving a response that's not directly related, because I don't know the answer, but one thing that may contribute to using the word "white" to describe white people, who, like you said, aren't really all that white, is that in languages spoken by more primitive cultures, there tend to be fewer color words.

    Without getting into tons of details, there's a pretty strong tendency for languages spoken by people with highly advanced material culture to have more color words. It's basically because we have a bigger variety of things to use as examples, and more need to make fine distinctions because we have such a large number of pigments with which to make paints and dyes. You don't need to distinguish between "cream" and "ecru" and "eggshell" and "ivory" and "off-white" and "parchment" unless you're deciding which color of paint to use on your walls.

    So, it's fairly likely that in a lot of these cultures, the vocabulary doesn't exist to easily describe the color of white folks' skin more precisely than "white". When it is necessary, of course, speakers could resort to long wordy descriptions of colors, and they probably do when they want to, say, specifically compare the skin tones of two people. But most primitive societies just aren't going to have a terse descriptor like "beige" in their vocabulary.

  3. #3
    aka ivan the not-quite-as-terrible ivan astikov's avatar
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    I'd have thought "pale" would have been a more oft used descriptor than "white", back in ye olden days? There definitely seems to be a religious overtone to the use of the word "white", with its associations to purity, don't ya think?

    As to the OP, I certainly don't equate the word "European" with "white".
    Last edited by ivan astikov; 05 Feb 2010 at 08:04 AM.
    To sleep, perchance to experience amygdalocortical activation and prefrontal deactivation.

  4. #4
    Sophmoric Existentialist
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    My Grandpa, who was born in Scotland in 1883, more or less believed that there were no white men east of the English channel, except for the Scandanavians and a few Germans. The rest were not "white", but were, variously, wogs, wops, dagoes, dogans, spics, and so on. Anyone darker than that? Well, the old "n" word covered the rest.

    He wasn't as awful as he sounds, he was pretty typical of his time.
    Sophmoric Existentialist

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