Not quite. Indo-European, yes - regular old Germanic language, no. English is quite anomalous within Germanic. For one thing, the verb system, especially the tense/aspect part of it, much more closely resembles that of Irish and Welsh than that of either German or the Scandinavian languages. As far as the lexicon goes, there is so much French influence in ther basic lexicon, not academic or learned language but basic vocabulary, that it has been remarked that if it were not for the existence of documents attestig to AS, if you only had the modern language as evidence to determine the affiliation of the language, there would be no principled reason for assigning the language to Germanic as opposed to Romance. (This kind of situation is not so uncommon.) What English clearly is is a British langugae along with Irish and Welsh, but then Sprachbunds are only for colorful people in remote parts of the world, so we don’t call it that.

Appropriation is not a simple binary good/bad issue. There is a spectrum between obnoxious and disrespectful appropriation e.g “Indian” war whoops at football games on one end and then ofn the other end respectful though distorting cultural borrowing e.g the widesperead use in Japan of English language on T-shirts or whatever, or what appears to be English as long as you don’t know english - it may be distorted, but it comes from a basic respect for the source culture.

And mixing Latin & Greek roots in the same word is “common”? Really? In over ten years of studying language and languages, I’ve never heard that one before. In exactly what percentage of English words does this phenomenon occur?

And Arnaud: so, just because a handful of people who happened to be Basque infringed someone else’s copyright, that means that small nations’ claims to owning their cultures are invalid? And actually, on second thought, I don’t give a toss about that Brit reporter anyway: it’s a huge issue that people like that reporter, usually from more dominant cultures, frequently English-speaking ones, come along, make money and build careers off of reporting situations and incidents occuring to smaller, relatively less powerful groups, then think that they somehow own the stories.

Oh, and speaking of recent history, didn’t England only outlaw slavery in 1957 or so?

No. Legislative abolition, as opposed to the de facto abolition of Somersett’s Case, was achieved in 1803.

In case you’re genuinely unaware, modern English is a random mess of words taken from other cultures and languages, not least of which is the common mixing of latin and greek terms in the same word. It doesn’t get much better after that. One thing you can say about increased global communication is that it’s making english even broader than it was before. From poppadums to pavlovas, mana to misogyny, english is impure and getting worse.

Oh, and speaking of recent history, didn’t England only outlaw slavery in 1957 or so?

Maori in the All Blacks, there has always been Maori in the ABs except for those tours of Apartheid South Africa.
The first natives tour of Britain was by players of all races born in NZ.

The haka Te Kamate when used by the ABs, yes it was a shambles until Buck Shelford was captain, his words, if we are going to do it, do it right.

argh, she argh’d quietly to herself.

what. the fuck.

…

sorry, nothing more coherent or useful to add, my brain is full.

Indigenous Australians have only been legally recognised as citizens of our own country since 1968. What were you saying about recent?

As for the rest of it… why is it such a radical suggestion on a progressive blog that white bloggers should be leery of appropriating language and culture from non-white minorities, particularly minorities they’ve had little to no contact with? As in, unless you’re absolutely sure your usage is non-problematic and accurate, don’t use it?

I was labouring under the understanding that this was a pretty common anti-racist assumption and basic 101 in putting the onus for avoiding racism and colonialism on those who are most likely to benefit from it.

The point isn’t that Violet’s usage WAS horribly problematic and violating… it is that the usage was inaccurate but presented as informed, potentially problematic, and coming from a position of privilege that doesn’t seem to have been taken into consideration. Since those are all hallmarks of colonialist appropriation, shouldn’t that be enough for a “yeah, maybe I should use a more appropriate metaphor”?

Only later did I find all the pictures were lifted, without credit or permission, and realise that the publishers were the same intellectual pirates from Navarra who had also ripped off G L Steer’s original Spanish civil war book and copyrighted it themselves.

It is territoriality again, anything about Basques they feel belongs to them.

Although they flout international laws of ownership, the Somali pirate and the Basque publisher both claim their action is somehow in the national interest.

Sailorman - European New Zealander

FTR, I got the list from “standing on stolen land.”

It’s interesting to me that you’re still talking about anti-racism, rather than colonialism. I’d agree with you that if people were coming from an informed place, and more importantly took into account hte history of colonialism in what they did, then that would . But, as I said earlier, in New Zealand what that generally means is pakeha who are aware of the history of colonisation don’t use the haka. I guess what I’m saying is that in this case being more informed generally does lead to recognising that it isn’t yours to play around with. Or rather that the only way that informed pakeha could use the haka, would have to take their subject position into account, and they’d have to primarily be talking about colonisation.

It’s hard to see how important protecting aspects of ones culture are when you come from a massive, world-dominating culture. But I’ve spent most of the past 20 years living in places where the languages and other aspects of culture have been outlawed and, as Radfem noted, physically beaten out of the local populations (try Googling “Welsh Not”). As a result, I get very impatient with arguments that minimise the importance recognising that some cultural expressions as belong to specific groups of people.

Most groups–whether you want to call them “ethnic groups” or “nations” or whatever–have been minimised, minoritised, silenced and even pretty much erased from the official public eye by dominant groups. This is hardly something out of the ordinary or restricted to certain times and places. Every nation state in existence today is far more complex in its composition than the official line it gives to the rest of the world.

Given all this, that most people see their identities either misrepresented or completely blotted out, to say that anyone is free to come along and pick up a random bit of the minoritised group’s culture and just use it, when those bits of culture are pretty much all that’s left to give the group identity, is plain wrong. In fact, it’s yet another example of the sort of offhand brutality and cruelty that comes from privilege.

I realise this is probably a bit garbled, but what I’m trying to get across is that it’s very easy to say that culture shouldn’t be seen as “owned” when your culture isn’t in danger of disappearing. When it is, when every little scrap of it has to be carefully safeguarded, it’s very hard to not see those scraps as very precious possessions.

That’s one way appropriation works, the idea that you’re entitled to use other people’s culture, even though you know nothing about it.

I don’t buy this entitlement argument. The whole idea of free speech is that you are entitled to say what you want in the way that you want to say it, even if it offends and upsets other people. Therefore there can be no valid entitlement grounds for objection.

I was using the indigenous populations in the United States as an example, because there are noticable parallels between how the cultural traditions have been banned or beaten out of people and then co-opted or appropriated often in a stereotypical fashion. The same most definitely would apply to many African and South-American cultures not to mention Asian ones and others as well.

There’s nothing wrong with disagreement. I just am leery of appropriation in general more in specific terms but also including general given the history. I don’t believe at any point I stated specifically that other people couldn’t do it nor did I forbid them. It just makes me feel uncomfortable.

I’m also not sure exactly what the boundaries of your argument *are*, really, though I appreciate your clarification. I still think that I probably disagree with you. I do think that people being well-informed and acting/writing/speaking/whatevering in an anti-racist way ameliorates many kinds of appropriation.

I stand on stolen land, where te reo (Maori language) was beaten out of children, and where Maori culture is a huge part of the resistance to colonisation.

I agree with this and also about indiginous peoples in the United States, where there’s some similarities in both how cultural traditions including language have been either outlawed by Whites or beaten out of indigenous people including children at the federal boarding schools. Then Whites appropriate those same cultural elements, often stereotype them for their own use including entertainment. I guess it’s the time and time and time again that cultural appropriation including stereotyping has been done whether to subvert sexism or to entertain one’s self or others including in the situation involving Amanda Marcotte’s book makes me wonder if there’s a way or means to avoid this or even a will in many cases.