Re: racist vs racialist?
| From: | Doug Dee <amateurlinguist@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, December 13, 2002, 20:16 |
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In a message dated 12/11/2002 3:13:44 PM Eastern Standard Time,
kesuari@YAHOO.COM.AU (replying to me) writes:
> > I'm told that the Australian aborigines call (or used to call) people
> > of European extraction "red." (Perhaps a lot of them got sunburned.)
> > Can you confirm that?
>
> I've never heard of that before. I've also heard that when they first
> saw white people (I think we're talking about the Dutch explorers who
> landed in what was to become Western Australia), they decided they were
> ghosts.
To follow up on white/red:
Volume 5 of the _Handbook of Australian Languages_ says that white people are
called red in Bunuba, a languge spoken in the northen part of Western
Australia.
That may or may not be the source I was orginally recalling, & it doesn't say
whether other Australian languages do the same thing.
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