The transformation of language:Hajji to Hadji

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by S.A.M., Oct 21, 2008.

  1. MacGyver1968 Fixin' Shit that Ain't Broke Valued Senior Member

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    I don't know..but I bet they got some good ones. What's "baby killer" in Arabic?
     
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  3. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    Here, I found it:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/opinion/24friedman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
     
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  5. kevinalm Registered Senior Member

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    >>edit This is in response to post #16. You guys got way ahead of me.

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    You misunderstand. Hadji in the show was well liked. Jonny and Hadji were adoptive brothers and best friends. Hadji was Jonny's equal. They would find themselves in perilous situations and Hadji was as likely as Jonny to be the one to find the way out, or they would solve the difficulty together.

    My point was that the term 'Hadji' as American's use it went through a period where it had no negative conotations at all. If anything, it would be complimentary, albeit perhaps slightly patronizing and mildly humorous.

    I'm not trying to justify any sort of namecalling, but the op was about how the word came to be used currently, and I thought this was relevent.
     
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  7. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks

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    It was insightful, I haven't heard about that show before.
     
  8. MacGyver1968 Fixin' Shit that Ain't Broke Valued Senior Member

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    It rocked! It was my favorite show as a kid.
     
  9. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The first slaves in North America were brought by the Spaniards, who called them negro, which is simply the Spanish word for "black person." The word was borrowed into English, normalized to our pronunciation of the long E. In Southern dialect the pronunciation was warped into "nigger," but I'm fairly sure it was not originally a derogatory word, at least no more derogatory than any word for someone you keep as a slave. When I was a kid in the 1950s, "niggrah" was sometimes used as the plural of "nigger" by Southerners.

    Niger is the Latin word for "black," from which Spanish negro and French noir are descended. The colonial powers named some of their African territories after the tribes who lived there, but in a few cases they came up with some colossally unimaginative names. The French named one of their colonies Niger, and the Brits named one of theirs Nigeria, based on that Latin word for "black." Today Niger is an independent country, but it's wrestling with the reality that when most anglophones read their name aloud it comes out sounding like "nigger," when in fact it's supposed to have a French pronunciation: nee-ZHAIR. There's a bird seed mix that is traditionally called "Niger seed," and I notice that pet and garden shops now spell it "Nyjer."

    The Jews have the same problem with the Yiddish word that literally means "black person: shvartze, from German schwarz. Somehow African-Americans got the idea that it is a derogatory term and demanded that they stop using it. I don't know what they picked to replace it; there aren't many people in America (or anywhere else) who speak Yiddish any more.
    That's another hypothesis for the origin of the word. As I mentioned, none of them has been definitively established.
    All the sources say that "bitch" has been an offensive term for women since the 15th century, and that the original sense was "spiteful or malicious," and had nothing to do with sexual activity.

    This is certainly counterintuitive, since the promiscuity of female dogs is legendary. They deliberately mate with every male they can, with the result that they all think the puppies might be theirs and will protect them. (In my experience as a dog breeder, they need to be protected from the other females, who really are "bitches" in both senses of the word.) The expression "son of a bitch" reinforces the supposition that "bitch" means "prostitute," and the current rap-thug-street slang of "bitches" for lowly women just adds to it. In other languages the term is "son of a whore."
    There is indeed certainly something strange going on with that word. I never write it except in this forum where any word is fair for linguistic analysis, but African-Americans get to shout it about five times per minute in rap lyrics--which are then dutifully bleeped from the radio as if it were profanity. I enjoyed one (African-American) comedian's suggestion: Euro-Americans should start using the word to refer to each other. It would vanish from the African-American vocabulary within 24 hours. I actually hear that occasionally across the river in Virginia. Euro-Americans call each other "nigger," with a similar meaning to the old term "white trash."
    Haji must be a given name in some Asian culture. There was a restaurant named Haji Baba in Los Angeles forty years ago.
     
  10. MacGyver1968 Fixin' Shit that Ain't Broke Valued Senior Member

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    Oh...off topic...Johnny Quest had a really bad ass theme. Here's a native rockabilly band from Dallas..Reverend Horton Heat..with their version of the theme.

    The band commented it was one of the hardest songs they ever recorded as it changes keys so many times .

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    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3glXpU_q3d8
     
  11. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    Haji Baba means Father Haji, its the name of a famous Muslim saint in India though Baba is also a name [besides being the word for Dad] so it would be possible to have people called Baba who were respectfully called Haji Baba

    Haji is attached as a prefix like Mister.
     

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