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'Master' and 'slave': Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts
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nuclearcat:
I dont know if i will open new page of hell, but word "robot" is invented in Czech, and derived from "robota" which is translated "slave(ry) work".
(grabbing pop-corn)
TimFox:
And the standard greeting 'ciao' derives from the Venetian phrase s-ciào vostro or s-ciào su literally meaning "I am your slave".  That's not the meaning in conversational Italian, however.
Nominal Animal:
The play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek introduced the word "robot" to English and dozens of other languages in the 1920s.  A classic.

The Finnish word for slave is 'orja', apparently derived from the Indo-Iranian 'Aryan'.  Yes, the word that in English is nowadays equated to white supremacy, has literally the same roots as the word 'slave' in Finnish.  (Finns were widely sold as slaves as far as Arabia.)

We don't have a simple word for 'master' in the master/slave sense; only things like 'orjapiiskuri' (one who whips slaves).  Even the word 'pomo' (boss) is from Russian помощник (pomóšnik), which means helper or assistant..  Finnish is weird, and may explain why some Finns like me have difficulties with other languages and concepts common in other languages.

(A book about old Finnish names mentions that a few hundred years ago, there was an originally Swedish merchant in Turku/Åbo who changed his name to a Finnish one, but was.. pranked by the locals.  You see, his name, 'Sianpillu', literally translates to 'A pig's vagina'.)
tooki:

--- Quote from: 2N3055 on June 11, 2020, 08:40:25 am ---And, just for you to know, abolishing speaking about things won't make things go away.  I was under impression that racial thing in USA is NOT that bad (I'm not from USA so I don't know how things are there), BECAUSE it is NOT PC to talk about it. For years, USA lies to rest of the world about this topic, by deliberately omitting information about it in mainstream media.

--- End quote ---
I am American. The thing to understand here is that the US wasn’t knowingly telling untruths to the rest of the world. The US was lying to itself about the state of racism. In particular, the white US kept telling itself racism was over, while the black US kept saying “no, it isn’t!”, but we basically ignored it because we’d been telling ourselves “we abolished segregation, so it’s done”. We believed it, but it was wrong. It was still there, hidden. Omnipresent video recording showed us racism was still around. And the current president brought it to a head by telling the racists that it was OK to be publicly racist — for decades, it had been something you admitted to behind closed doors. Now they wear it as a badge of pride.

Ultimately, though, the important lesson (and one I think a LOT of forum members here need to really take to heart) is that if a minority is telling us they feel oppressed, we need to listen, not dismiss it.

We may not agree on how to solve the problem, or whether we have to make a specific change. But it’s callous and arrogant to wholesale dismiss the grievances, as happens here on the forums every single time a progressive social issue is raised.
TimFox:
The difference now is that before 1954, racial segregation was not only legal, but it was mandatory in many places.  That was progress, but socially there is a great deal left to do.
Alexis de Tocqueville noted this problem even before the Civil War, in the chapter "The Three Races of North America" in his classic "Democracy in America" (1835), and was pessimistic about an eventual solution.
By the way, Nominal Animal, does "orjapiiskuri" literally mean "overseer" or "supervisor" in Finnish?
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