Re: LOTR credit line

Quoting J Y S Czhang <czhang23@...>:
my uncle Kai can't stop
> his gigglefits at the idea that there are "Whites" and
> "People of Colour"... he grew up in British Colonial Malaya
> but clearly recalls the Americana of the '50s -
> the whole "Whites" and "Coloured"bs-biz:
>  "Gor-frikkin'-Blimey! Are not we going a tad little
>  _retro_ here all-a-sudden 'gain, lah?")
Since the racial colour labels 'White', 'Black' and 'Yellow' (not to
mention 'Red') are so obviously misaligned to the usage of these colour terms
in other contexts, I sometimes wonder if they may originally come from a
language with a very limited set of colour terms. If you speak a language that
distinguishes only 2-4 basic colours, white people's skin may really be
the "same" colour as snow and blacks' as charcoal, just as, to anglophones,
the blue of the summer sky is the "same" colour as the blue of ink.

Tangentially, I've heard that some SEAsian peoples consider Chinese to
be "white". I wonder what they think of Europeans - perhaps "red"?

                                                            Andreas

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