Cultural appropriation

[eirias]

Pursuant to a conversation elsewhere, a poll!

NOTE! For the purpose of this poll, "foreigner" refers to someone who is foreign in several ways:

1. he has no familial claim to the culture (no relation by blood or marriage);
2. he does not and has not lived in the culture;
3. he has no deep knowledge or understanding of the culture, and/or does not speak the language.

Use the comments to clarify anything you like.

(Note: I submitted blank answers but that's only so I can easily see poll results without changing them; one should not infer from that that I think all the options are inappropriate.)

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[Poll #1267976]

Comments

[eldan.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what that phrase means, and while I already have the good sense not to do what you describe, I'd love to see the translation.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

You may rely on Google, as I am too scandalized to write it in English :). Let's just say that -- much to the surprise of my former, middle-school-boy students -- the Roman vocabulary for the sexually and scatologically obscene was far more detailed, specific, and sophisticated than ours.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

You may rely on Google, as I am too scandalized to write it in English :).

That, in itself, is an odd statement. You are okay with Latin speakers knowing you are a dirty, dirty person who harbors dirty, dirty thoughts, but not with English speakers knowing same?

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Kinda incongruous, huh? If there were more Latin speakers around I might have to revise that position ;).

It's funny, actually -- there's this thing, the Loeb Classical Library, which is totally indispensable for classics students. They're volumes of the classical corpus with the Latin or Greek on one side and an English translation on the other. The series is around a century old, iirc, so the translations pass through some really different styles and mores. If you get one of the older ones, and it has a scandalous Latin passage, the facing-page translation will be English...until the scandalous part...when it is in Italian. I guess they figured, if you're sufficiently educated, you can handle it, but we must keep the radioactive language segregated from the unwashed masses. I think there's something similar with dirty Greek passages being translated into Latin. (The result, of course, is mature, highly educated grad students huddled together in the classics library snickering.)

In this particular case, though, the phrase I used is a direct and famous quote. It's not *my* dirty thoughts, per se ;). But yes, I do have strong inhibitions against using certain English obscene vocabulary, which entirely illogically do not seem to apply to Latin.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Now that gives me a strong incentive to learn Latin. You should've told that to your charges...

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Why do you assume I didn't?

[eirias.livejournal.com]

"Hi, boys! In English I'm a proper young lady, but learn Latin with me and we can talk smut!"

If you can pull that off, more power to you, man. :)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Well, I didn't phrase it *that* way...

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

See, in ages where smut was harder to gain access to, I imagine this was an entirely common reason to learn Latin.

[evil-fizz.livejournal.com]

Googling for it led me to this fabulous list of irreverent Latin phrases. (http://tigress.com/emax/latin.html) I can't be 100% certain of its accuracy, but the phrase mentioned definitely runs to the scatological.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's pretty good. (You can see why it's hard to find accurate translations.)