Caltrops - Earthbound





	[quote name="Noi Dau Don"][quote name="laudablepuss"][quote name="Noi Dau Don"][quote name="laudablepuss"]But set that aside, what I said above is true. <b>So, don't post .gifs of the Joker, tell me what your problem is.</b> (My Central Asian history prof was French, and liked to use the word "milieu" a lot. The next semester, my prof was Uzbek. I think. I forget now.)[/quote] Did you just scold me, you ass? I'm giving you this one on credit, but next time just assume I wouldn't mock you pointlessly like so much QB and fucking google it yourself. Saying Iranian is synonymous with Indo-European is <i>identical</i> to saying that Nordic person is synonymous with Indo-European. "Iranian" is a distinct type that can't even be considered - genetically, politically, culturally - identical to Arabs, much less the entire body of Indo-Europeans. AND WHILE WE ARE AT IT when you say "Indo-European" are you referring to language groups or ethnic groups? Because usually Indo-European is used to refer to language groups, and the roughly analogous ethnic term is Caucasian or Caucasoid. [/quote] I'm well aware of this, and that's why he went out of his way to use a lower-case "i". In the sense he used it, Nordics are iranians. It's weird, I know. I only threw it in there to see if anyone else had heard of this: clearly nobody has. Perhaps a better way of expressing it (using your preferred terminology) is iranian = caucasoid. Language groups are a good approximation of ethnic groups, usually. I know French and English are spoken far beyond their ethnic groups, for example, but they're exceptions. It's a safe bet that throughout history, people who spoke a language were also members of that culture and ethnicity.[/quote] This is one of those subjects on which I get hissy and catty unless words are used <i>very carefully</i>. An uncapitalized "iranian" - this must be some fucked up French thing, or he is possibly using it in some stilted socio-cultural sense to indicate "people whose civilizations spread from the fertile crescent." That's the best I can do on that one. I've never seen anything like it before in my life. Language groups ~= ethnic groups WELL, let's just put it this way, there's a reason that the term for an ethnic group is not interchangeable with the one for an ethnic group. "Altaic" is a perfect example of this, since the language group is pretty much Mongolian and Turkish <font size=-2>and Korean? can't remember</font> with Chinese/Japanese included just because where the fuck else will you put them. But Mongols, Turks, and Nips are all distinctly different ethnically and culturally. French and English are not ethnicities. They are nationalities. Ethnicities would be Saxon, Norman, Celtic, Gallic, etc. English and French are not the only languages so privileged. Further exceptions are disgustingly numerous: Greek, Latin, Spanish, Flemish, Japanese all come to mind very quickly. Russian-the-language is spoken over an area of dazzling immensity by participants of horrendously many ethnic groups, and ethnic Russians will take enormous exception to being told that the dirt-people in the far east are "Russian." Language = culture = ethnicity: nope nope no no no nope no. Language ties to empire, culture to locality, ethnicity to genetics. There are often broad overlaps but this statement still comes off as just hopeful handwaving on your part. I get the vague impression that you are mentally limiting your use of these terms to majority members of each (Saxon-Normans in England speak English and participate in mainstream English culture) but this level of granularity is basically only useful for generating webcomics like <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/hetaliaindexes/">Axis Powers Hetalia</a> and not at all useful for talking about the relationships between languages, races, identities, or cultures. tl;dr your professors were fucking wrong, and they should give thanks daily that I was not in their classes. [/quote]