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> I would've hoped that an expert who was lecturing about language and culture would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.

I’m learning Mandarin Chinese and consequently have use "nei-ge" quite a high number of times and I also happen to know English and it NEVER occured to me it is somehow related to the n-word before today. People who want to see racism could find everywhere anyway, it’s a lost battle.

Not using words that could be insulting in other languages is an impossible tasks and ridiculous thing to ask given how many of them there is.

Its like the playing records backward craze in the 80s and trying to hear as many satanic words as possible

> would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.

People who aren't racist don't anticipate that kind of "problems" because we don't obsess about race. Furthermore, while the words may sound "problematic" to a non Chinese speaker, anyone with some fluency would probably not even notice the similarity.

Let's do an experiment. Read the following aloud (the louder the better), preferably to another person:

I AM SOFA KING! WE TADD DEED!

The person who uttered it is a professor lecturing on language and culture. So it's unfortunate if they weren't aware of that aspect of cultural sensitivity in language, or accidentally missed it this time.

As I said, I think this could be a constructive learning moment for a lot of people. (Though it might not be, if all dialogue is shouted&voted down by a team rivalry: between those who want to cancel everything they disagree with, and those who presume to understand the situations of everyone else and are the better arbiter of what everyone else has a right to care about.)

> I think this could be a constructive learning moment for a lot of people

Please.

>I would've hoped that an expert who was lecturing about language and culture would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.

If you're speaking Mandarin you are going to hear this homophone with even less context than the professor is giving. Should professors slow down their lectures (which he did explaining the context) or compromise their education by simply not covering the topic to protect the sensibilities of adults?

>One reason I would suspect it's a problem (which I heard in a TV show, in which a character explains how an anti-gay slur is hurtful to them), is that they grew up hearing that slur hurled in the context of other injustices, from childhood. I can also imagine that insensitivity to how hurtful a slur is could feel like a signal that someone doesn't understand or care about the associated injustices.

Trigger warnings are not meaningfully helpful or harmful https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/216770261982701...

I've at least experienced hearing slurs in negative contexts, and people discussing them brashly without "contextualizing" it. Sometimes it's pretty jarring, sometimes it feels bad. I still have absolutely no patience for not even engaging in, but enforcing under threat to somebodies career that they engage in the practice of trigger warnings. That is just using peoples suffering to push a personal agenda which nominally will help other people but which evidence shows will not help other people.

Or you know, we could just tell these idiots to grow up or get therapy.

There was no malice intended here at all. If people can't even hear a word from another language that vaguely resembles a racial slur when used in a non malicious context then they probably need therapy. Not coddled.

>however, I would've hoped that an expert who was lecturing about language and culture would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.

The problem with that line of thinking is that there is no "problem" to begin with, aside from an inflated sense of entitlement from a group of outrage enthusiasts who believe context is irrelevant.

I think you need to be developmentally disabled to genuinely think that foreign language words that resemble curses in your language are offensive. It's not on the professor to do backflips to protect against people looking for excuses to get offended.

I'd say it's not merely a curse word, for reasons I already suggested in the comment to which you're replying: I argue that it's understandably hurtful to some, and is associated with immense, tragic, shameful wrongs towards groups of people.

Separately, could you have made your point without saying that anyone who thinks differently than you must be developmentally disabled? Would it have been sufficient to say you don't understand why someone would think differently? Or, if you were very confident, and felt some emphasis were needed, could you have emphasized with more detail in a logical argument?

> hurtful to some

If you're hurt by hearing someone speaking Chinese, there is something wrong with you, not with the Chinese speaker.

It's more that I think the only way you can be earnestly offended by something like this is if you're stupid, and I don't think they're stupid. I think they're dishonest. It's not reasonable to be offended by phonemes in Cantonese. I don't think they're sensitive, I think they're lying.

Thanks for the explanation. I wouldn't be surprised if some people are feigning outrage. But it's intuitive to me that some others would be genuinely bothered by the appearance of insensitivity to culture in language, by a professor who seems to be speaking as an expert about language and culture. (Not that there's anything wrong with a foreign language, nor with the coincidences in sound, of course.)

If I saw someone in the class who seemed offended, or they mentioned it to me, I'd reach out to the professor privately. Or, if I knew the professor, and had occasion to see this, I'd ask them if they thought there might be a sensitivity they want to realize and address.

Why is it insensitive?

Like, look at it in the first person. Can you imagine being hurt if you were being taught Indian and one of their words was "kike"? That's incomprehensible to me. It's totally loopy.