I haven’t thought of this. I just thought that looking into the professor for legitimately using Mandarin Chinese was an overreaction. You’re right–disavowing certain, ubiquitous words in Mandarin Chinese is certainly a microaggression as well.
I’m pretty sure the outcome of this will not be that Mandarin students can’t say “that” anymore.
Monolingual-centric madness. Apparently some peoples brains are so puny that they can’t process the idea that humans can make only a limited number of sounds and some will mean different things.
The professor really knows what false friends are now.
What do you think the outcome will be?
That Mandarin students will continue to be able to say “nega” and that this professor will come off suspension and continue teaching. What are your thoughts?
Also, personally, I’m going to continue to avoid outrage news, designed to piss me off, especially when one of the main purveyors is rt.com. The idea that one professor’s short-term suspension makes any difference is complete madness.
Are you serious? Did you watch the video? He is explicitly talking about filler words in other languages, and noting the common filler word in Mandarin, it’s beyond any conceivable misunderstanding that he’s doing anything other than say the Chinese word neige. He does not have any burden to not be misunderstood by utterly stupid people who aren’t paying attention to his lecture.
What exactly is a Chinese-language instructor supposed to do, going forward from now on? You can’t avoid teaching the word “that;” it’s one of the most common words in vocabulary.
Is an instructor supposed to preface with a careful trigger warning, “Now, I’m going to have to teach a word that can be misunderstood, it is unavoidable because it is so common, it sounds like the N-word, the word is ni ge? ‘That car’ is ni ge che zi, ‘that person’ is ni ge ren, ‘that thing’ is ni ge dong xi?”
Isn’t negro the word for black in Spanish? (My source is two years of high school Spanish back in the 90s, FWIW)
This is what’s unclear to me. According to at least one poster, the investigation is not yet over.
In my eyes, given the apologetic letter from the dean, I think this investigation is basically and functionally over. The dean apologized to the students for being forced to listen to this psychologically traumatizing word. So…uh…what’s the next logical step? Seems like the dean has tied his own hands here–the dean stated that hearing the racial slur, or things that sound similar to the racial slur–causes psychological trauma. The next logical step seems to be a complete ban on this word.
For some reason, the dean releasing a second letter stating something along the lines of “I know that some students were traumatized by this Mandarin Chinese word that sounds like a racial slur, but we’re going to allow it anyway” wouldn’t be logically consistent with his first letter’s reasoning.
“The world’s nearly one billion Mandarin speakers have no obligation to organize their speech to avoid random similarities with English words, and neither do our faculty (or students or anyone else) when they are speaking Mandarin. Indeed, it would be oddly Anglocentric (and indeed offensive to Mandarin speakers) to assume otherwise.”
You know that it is, and that this easily verified.
I suppose Niger and Nigeria have to change their names, and we must hope no one learns what “Sudan” means.
It seems that the dean should have simply released one letter and made this a good learning opportunity, explaining how the professor meant no harm and that some words in other languages might happen to sound like certain offensive words in English. And that students who were psychologically traumatized can always seek the help of the school’s therapists, who are there thanks to the tuition money that everyone pays.
I think this is quite different. This is an English word that closely resembles an offensive word in the same language. And it’s an obscure word that I’d guess is unknown to at least 75% of the population, and not part of everyday usage for anyone. The potential for misunderstanding when you know someone is speaking English is genuine and easy to foresee for any English speaker, and it’s a minimal burden to find a synonym on the rare occasions when one might want to use it. Not that it should be a capital crime if someone does use it without ill intent, but there’s a perfectly reasonable common sense case for avoiding it.
You really expect logical consistency? 
The dean apologized and suspended the professor on reflex. The professor will get a rap over the knuckles for not understanding how dumb his students are. He will issue a humble apology, and will be back teaching as soon as the fuss has died down a bit.
It’s true, but given the situation, and the fact that it’s not unlikely to change, why give them more ammunition?
Everything idiotic that is done in the name of political correctness is just handing them ammunition. I wish this kind of thing would stop, but that’s probably asking the impossible.
I really wish I had control over that dean’s thoughts, but alas, I do not. Are you addressing this to all humans who may make some stupid mistake or statement that right wingers and Russian propagandists will blow out of proportion? Seems like a big ask.
I am serious. I did watch the video. Are you serious? Did you read my post? I explicitly wrote, “I do agree, though, that the university in this case seems to have dramatically over-reacted.”
But I also think that a communications professor, in a communications lecture, bears at least a little bit of burden of educating his listeners about the words he’s using, especially when he’s using a foreign language word that he has no reason to expect his listeners to know, which sounds remarkably like a racial slur in English.
That’s it. He bears a little bit of the burden. Yes, even a little bit of burden to educate “utterly stupid people who aren’t paying attention to his lecture.”
I guess I’m puzzled as to why you think the correct response is to insist that it doesn’t matter, that there’s nothing to see here, that we should ignore the story; rather than simply responding by agreeing that the suspension is idiotic and wrong. Surely if everyone on the left responds that they agree that the Dean’s actions were stupid and wrong, that’s the way to dispel the propaganda that this is somehow typical of the way people on the left think.
Turn it around. A right-wing nutjob does something crazy like, I don’t know, putting up a plaque with the Ten Commandments outside a courthouse. Does it reflect better on mainstream Republicans if the general reaction you hear is “meh, nothing to see here, let’s ignore it”, or if the general reaction is “we agree that’s wrong, take the plaque down”?
I hereby declare that this suspension is stupid and wrong.