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Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

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Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#371

Post by djaque »

I think all of the comments here that say "McCarthyism and cancel culture have taken over our universities!" miss the point.

The real story is that in the US, we are politically polarized enough to buy into the dean's story that this is the only reason for the suspension.

Universities are run as businesses nowadays and I can assure you that they don't care about angry students unless there is money or prestige to be made in appeasing them. At a past university I attended, class enrollment was horribly broken causing people to miss out on courses they needed to graduate. Basically the whole student body was mad and made it known and sent around petitions, but nothing changed. The fix being pushed by students would literally just require changing a config file somewhere and sending some emails, but nobody cared.

If universities won't lift a finger for issues that cause campus wide outrage, why would I believe that they'd suspend someone after a twitter minority gets unreasonably angry about something like this. I'm at one of the super liberal universities in the US and I can promise you that it really is a minority. Even in the liberal arts classes I've attended, everyone I've met would be like "yeah, that's an unfortunate mistake and at most you should probably just inform him that the word sounds like a slur". I have literally never met someone that would call for a firing except for on twitter. I've also taught classes here and never met one, so I know it isn't a selection effect where I'm in a bubble. I don't get to choose the students I teach.

There is 100% more going on than what the dean is claiming. Maybe it's administrative drama. Maybe the professor wasn't pulling in enough grant money. Maybe the university was eyeing his salary and knew about an adjunct that will do it cheaper and thought that this would be a nice excuse to make a change. From everything I know about universities and from currently working at one, the guy didn't get fired for something as outlandish as saying a word that sounded like something else. It just doesn't make sense.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#372

Post by galkk »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #41

Two possible futures for ill-informed over-political correctness: 1. It continues to be pushed by those at the tops of organizations, which leads to a new pseudo-language of baby-talk that is constructed to be as inoffensive as possible. Simultaneously a ‘black market’ counter-culture emerges of those who don’t comply. 2. The entire enterprise collapses under its own weight and exhaustion. People get tired of being o…

> People get tired of being offended and move on.

Won't happen, until it brings them benefits.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#373

Post by galimaufry »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #253

It sounds like he can sue for lost and potential lost salary for sure. This is not a legitimate reason to fire him if he was doing it innocently. Students could have said something and he could have avoided it I suppose. However whenever I hear the term "microaggressions" I know I'm talking with an idiot who values being emotional over being logical and just stop the conversation.

I really don't think that Chester Pierce was an idiot who valued being emotional over being logical.

While there is disagreement over how prevalent they are or what if anything should be done about them, micro-aggressions obviously exist. I find this sort of hostility to the very concept perplexing.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#374

Post by tartoran »

bonoboTP wrote: post #368
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my company, someone objected to the terms “male” and “female” adapter ports or connectors for physical hardware equipment in our data centers, stating it was both offensive to gender non-binary coworkers and also fostered an aggressive general sense of violation of female genitalia. Several engineering leaders forced the Networks team to create an internal RFC on proposed naming convention changes for this, which…

> In my company, someone objected to the terms “male” and “female” adapter ports or connectors for physical hardware equipment in our data centers, stating it was both offensive to gender non-binary coworkers and also fostered an aggressive general sense of violation of female genitalia. This reminds me of people hiding and covering table legs in the Victorian era.

That is a myth although a very funny one.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#375

Post by danielam »

When I was a child, I was in the supermarket with my mother and apparently I was repeating some Polish phrase containing the infinitive “to be”. The Polish equivalent is “być” which sounds like “bitch”. From what I’ve been told, it drew some attention, but the impression I’m left with is that eavesdroppers were more amused than offended. Similarly, my Spanish-speaking classmates in school found it amusing that a common way to refer to one’s aunt is “ciocia” which is pronounced like the Spanish word “chocha”. The same holds for English words like “duper” as in “super duper” which sounds almost like the Polish “dupa” (especially when spoken in non-rhotic English). This extends to brand names (the name of the German lighting manufacturer Osram is a good example: it is the simple future first conjugation of the Polish transitive verb “to shit all over“).

Given how ubiquitous this phenomenon is, and how international UPenn is, I am having trouble comprehending how a professor could be fired for a perfectly banal Chinese expression which many of us have heard many times in American cities with significant Chinese populations.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#376

Post by svrb »

javajosh wrote: post #278

This action is so obviously wrong I can't but wonder if its not some prank. It would be an ideal prank for the Chinese in particular, to audit the course (at first as an attempt to see how Chinese language and culture is taught here), and then stumble upon this coincidental pronunciation, in the context of a tinder-dry atmosphere of political correctness, and send in (multiple) complaints and watch America burn just…

> open-mindedness of the left

Did you even read the article? How is cancel culture "open-minded"? I'm legitimately confused and shook at how you could come to that conclusion... It would be really helpful if you could explain it.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#377

Post by krapp »

svrb wrote: post #376
javajosh wrote: post #278

This action is so obviously wrong I can't but wonder if its not some prank. It would be an ideal prank for the Chinese in particular, to audit the course (at first as an attempt to see how Chinese language and culture is taught here), and then stumble upon this coincidental pronunciation, in the context of a tinder-dry atmosphere of political correctness, and send in (multiple) complaints and watch America burn just…

> open-mindedness of the left Did you even read the article? How is cancel culture "open-minded"? I'm legitimately confused and shook at how you could come to that conclusion... It would be really helpful if you could explain it.

Why do you believe "the left" is entirely defined by "cancel culture?"

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#378

Post by elihu »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #298
anonu wrote: post #255

The comment at the end is spot on: Please know that there are many people that support you and are sick of this hyper-sensitive, McCarthyism-like environment that is being fostered across the country." My view on this is it's the culmination of years of anti free speech trends on campus. It's a sad day when universities which should be bastions of tolerance, exploration and ideas have their culture consistently chipp…

I have said this before and will continue to say this: to put an end to this, liberals in the United States need to openly repudiate identity politics progressivism and cancel culture. Former-President Obama has ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-ca... ); we should too. Please speak up and, more importantly, please vote for old-school liberals instead of progressives.

I'm okay with Obama rejecting identity politics if that's what he's doing, but it seems to me more like he's been spending his time post-presidency advocating for a certain style of incremental reform: just make small fixes right now to make things a little bit better, and as he likes to say: "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice".

The problem I have with that, is that for some problems you can't just fix it with incremental reform, you have to rip the bandaid off, and if you reject any reforms that aren't small incremental fixes to what we have, you end up fixing the small problems and leaving the big structural problems. Opinions will reasonably differ on how to deal with the problems facing society, but Obama's approach seems to me to be a little bit like vacuuming your living room while the house is on fire.

On the other hand, you have someone like Bernie Sanders, who isn't at all shy about advocating for significant structural reforms (similar in scope to the New Deal) and is about as progressive as anyone can be in American politics, yet at the same time he doesn't put any stock in identity politics either. I haven't listened to as much from AOC, but I get the impression she's the same way. In fact, I don't know of any major political leader who fits the mold of the "social justice warrior" or "political-correctness police" stereotype. I haven't run into very many of those people in my day-to-day life either, but my impression is that they're largely people without any great deal of power except maybe on University campuses.

Tl;dr: don't be afraid to vote for progressives in general with the aim of thwarting identity politics. A lot of prominent progressives aren't really fans of it either.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#379

Post by frereubu »

pixel_fcker wrote: post #348
frereubu wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that microaggressions are real, that language really has import, and I've been noticing those kinds of things more and more on a daily basis. But this is entirely unwarranted and a gross overreaction. Having said that, I also understand the terror that this kind of issue generates in organisations. Imagine you're the dean of an institution in an environment where people only read the headlines in their Facebo…

This seems like a perfect example of why micro-aggressions are bullshit. Any right-thinking person can see that those taking offence to this are wrong, while the theory of micro-aggressions posits that because they are offended their feelings are valid and the professor must be in the wrong.

That's not the way I understand microaggressions, which aren't to do with whether someone is offended or not. The idea is that if, for example, you're black, and day in, day out, there are lots of little things that on their own aren't worth being upset about (for example, people not holding the door for you, pushing in front of you in line, crossing the road rather than walk past you, assume you're low-level staff rather than a manager) it's the cumulative effects of those small - micro - things that really adds up. The whole idea is that they don't matter on their own, and if they were the exception rather than the rule then they'd be easy to ignore.

In terms of what you're saying about this particularly case it's pretty simple - what happened here is not a micro-aggression because it's not aggressive at all, so the use of the term here by the dean is simply wrong.

Re: Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge

#380

Post by hombre_fatal »

globular-toast wrote: post #151
logicchains wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You" and "me" are pronunced "nee-gah" and "ne-gah"? Those sound very similar, does that ever lead to misunderstandings?

I know nothing about the language being discussed here, but the answer is no, it doesn't lead to misunderstandings. How do I know this? Because it's a natural language. The language exists for no reason other than the fact that it works. If the words sounded exactly the same you could safely assume that they either communicate the difference some other way, or the difference simply does not matter to them. An example…

> but the answer is no, it doesn't lead to misunderstandings

Natural languages offer misunderstandings between native speakers all the time. A sentence like "Bajó" in Spanish or "They went downstairs" in English can have many different antecedents for the listener to choose between (bad subtitle translations can give you a master class in this). If I say "the food is hot," do I mean it's temperature-hot or spicy-hot?

I would refine your statement to simply point out that natural languages aren't damned by misunderstandings because:

(1) You have the tools to disambiguate ahead of time if you think it might be ambiguous. "Maria bajó", "Maria went downstairs", "They both went downstairs together".

(2) The listener can simply ask for clarification.

(3) It doesn't necessarily matter. The point of the story was that John couldn't enjoy the soup, not whether it was too hot or too spicy.

All that said, I think the person above was just asking how similar the pronunciation was between two words.

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