IS "MURZYN" word RACIST?

@haley69

... paint yourself and see how people treat you for having brown skin

You have got to be joking. No one is attacking you, spitting on you, refusing you service, etc because of your skin color. Then you'd actually have something to complain about. Youre being waaaay too sensitive. You're going to get stares in poland hell I get stared at and I'm polish. When my grandma first saw a black guy from the window in hrt house in poland she left to get a good look at him because she never saw a black person. Its not bc shes racist its because she was curious about something/someone she doesnt encounter everyday just like the poles that stare at you. Explain to people youre indonesian/indian hence youre darker skin and that's it. Do that I guarantee that people wont bring up some child's poem. However if you're all upset because people think you're african and start brow beating them for stereotyping youre going to get a defensive response in kind.

@Easy_Terran
'Pitchy' could be "pidgin English" (pronounced somewhere between 'pigeon' and 'pitch in'), used to describe a crude-but-understandable blend of English vocabulary and grammar mixed together with whatever the local language is, and vice-versa. When my mother visited Chicago about 50 years ago, she claims to have heard this comment on a local Polish radio station about unleashed pets causing traffic problems: "No, dogi latajow po streetcie i cary honkujow na nich!" (Please excuse my 'spelling'; I learned to read Polish as a small child but never really got the hang of writing it - hope you got the gist.) This could be described as either pidgin English or pidgin Polish, depending on what your 'home' language is.

Always was under the impression that czarnuch meant trash.. and saw a source a while back that confirmed the lesser intent of the word. But now the web is saying it means the N word... that is not a word i use. Nor is it one i approve of. So was the other source cmpletely incorrect?

The word «Murzyn» is derived from "Moors" who were famous black skinned muslims.

I guess an Afro-American could get pretty upset being called a black skinned Jihadist

NOTHING RACIST IN "MURZYN". Murzyn is a word for blacks and "biały" is a word for whites. Nothing racist in those. Take your PC and shove it up your...


How many Poles know/ever heard of the word "Moor"?


Politically Correctness obssesed leftard Afro-American (and any other race in that matter) could get upset by basically ANYTHING.

Curious thing about all PC is no one has ever owned up to setting up its scope or criteria, deciding what measures up or not, nor even who or what institution introduced the term itself. Eh?! I suppose it must have "created itself out of nothing",.like our universe.

@NoToForeigners

To talk in racial categories or think that there are different humans based on skin colour and wanting to base your politics/policies on it is indeed rascist. No tantrums will change that.

@Sylvio
Nowadays it's very emotional and used in any discussion to silence opponents. No matter what they think it Really means

[moved from]


Murzyn (Polish pronunciation: [muʐɨn]) is the most common Polish word for a black person. It is generally seen as a neutral word,[1] while other contemporary critics, mostly of non-Polish ethnicity, claim that it has pejorative connotations.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murzyn

In Russia, the term негр (negr) was commonly used in the Soviet period without any negative connotation, and its use continues in this neutral sense. In modern Russian media, the negr is used somewhat less frequently. Chyorny as an adjective is also used in a neutral sense, and conveys the same meaning as negr, as in чёрные американцы (chyornye amerikantsy, "black Americans"). Other alternatives to negr are темнокожий (temnokozhy, "dark-skinned"), чернокожий (chernokozhy, "black-skinned"). These two are used as both nouns and adjectives. See also Afro-Russian.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*****#Elsewhere

Just for your future knowledge.

Murzyn is a completely normal word and not at all the equivalent of n|gger, except for the ignorant, pejoratives for black people exist in Polish (czarnuch, asfalt and bambus being the most common)

I remember jon357 and Harry some time ago displaying hysteria on this forum because ethnic Poles were telling them Murzyn was a neutral word, whereas the said two clowns thought otherwise.

That's where political correctness may eventually lead people to ...

Rm the black guy already comes from a hole much worse than Poland in many cases. I know some people from here that went to there for holidays who are not Polish, i told them it could be interesting for them. They didnt think its a hole at all, infact the opposite. I showed them your posts and they seem to think you are some type of a troll. I am yet to be convinced.

That label has worn so thin...
I should have been more explicit. I didn't mean to say that Poland is a "hole in the ground". On so many levels, Poland is a shinning star in the dark days of Western Europe's decay. If I offended anyone, I apologize.

I meant to speak from the perspective of that black American soldier from Chicago who, until he was placed in Poland, wouldn't be able to find it on the map. To him, Poland is like Somalia to me. That's it. I will try to do a better job next time.

Ok i understand now. It would be from their perspective probably.

Ive gotten dindu going amongst my friends and family. If you ever hear a pole call a black a dindu, youll know who to thank.

(Dindu, short for ah dindu nuffin - the most commonly used phrase by blacks when being questioned by police or arrested)

How do you decline that? It sounds very awkward for Polish....

kogo czego? kim czym? komu czemu?

Dindu, dindusy, dindusa, dindusow, etc.. kind of like other English words in polish i.e. text, facebook/face-a, etc

"Murzyn" isn't an archaic term or it is as archaic (slightly less, in fact) as other terms of the Polish language. What's the point in changing terms in Polish into more modern ones, pray tell ! Is it common practice in the English language to constantly "modernize" its vocabulary?

I hear "fast food" very often (and it is declined), but I never hear "car wash" instead of "myjnia" in everyday speech. Perhaps the reason is that we do not have a good counterpart for "fast food" just as we don't have such one for "weekend". The other reason is that :"fast food" is handy and easily declineable, e.g. "idę do fast foodu" rather than "idę do baru szybkiej obsługi" which would be awful and would mean a slightly different thing. For "junk food", I typically hear "śmieciowe jedzenie".

I cannot imagine anyone saying "musze jechać do car washa" which would sound idiotic, so it has never been used in speech which doesn't exclude instances where some idiots would express themselves that way. It also doesn't exclude banners displaying the name of an enterprise, but that's a different story.

From my school days, I remember Polish the famous Polish cabaret actress Hanka Bielicka exclaiming to a group of us, primary school pupils asking her for an autograph at some backstage corridor: "Ciemno tu jak u Murzyna w dupie!" while reaching out for her handbag to take out a pile of photographs so as to write a dedication on them for everyone. If it were a Shakespeare theatre, I'm sure she would have exclaimed "Mehr Licht!" ...


Hanka Bielicka

Yes Ziemowit, you are correct in your assertion that from a linguistic point of view, the word "murzyn" stands up.
From a 21st century point of view, it doesn't. I appreciate your treatise, because I used to work in academia, although I am pretty thick.

What would you suggest in its place? There's no other convenient word...

@Dougpol1
Why people suppose to care in 21 century which word is "offensive" for someone or not? Freedom of speech! Central or Eastern Europe doesn't care about US created weirdness!

Exactly. No Pole is going to stop using the word murzyn just because some liberals from the west don't like it.

According to some Russian info sources (I'm not sure it is absolutely reliable, but still I think the info is likely correct) Ukrainian ministry of education and science issued "anti-discriminatory measures" in 2018 and decided to eradicate from Ukrainian textbooks an offensive words such as negry (a neutral word in Ukrainian and Russian for a black Africans), cyganie (a neutral word for the gipsy) and zhydy (a neutral word in Ukrainian and Polish for Jews). In Russian this word was neutral too, before the beginning of the 20-th century, but later was displaced by the Bolsheviks from Russian language for some strange reasons, possibly as imaginably offensive by somebody.

Also (what is the most strange) such words as "the parents", "the family" "the relatives" and similar are also became undesirable. To explain why ministry of education murmurs something about poor orphans in Donetsk who may feel discriminated.

I wonder how much normal and regular Ukrainians are going to laugh about that. Also I wonder why Americans export in Central and Eastern Europe their mental problems...

I think that the very idea of some "prohibited words" which cannot be said in public and regarded as "offensive" is unacceptable and is a dangerous advance against freedom of speech. Also I'm very cautious about responsibility for saying any words or any kind of insults. At least for the reason of controversy and vagueness and false accusations and "witnesses" which can spark an ethnic conflict or "discredit" an innocent person at ease.

Its not a racist word!

Murzyn may not be racist but American most certainly is if you follow our race baiter-in-chief, Jesse Jackson. He is the one who invented that idiotic African-American so now referring to blacks as just Americans must be racist and culturally offensive or at least very insensitive. Somehow, the demagogue forgot about me and my hyphen like in European-American.. So, as long as I am just "white", they will be simply "black".

They are black. Nothing else to say.

Almost there...
We need a neutral, simple and non-offensive way of referring to "blacks" and "whites" other than black and white, as neither term is physically true. "African-American" and "European-American" are too pompous to be used daily.

honkey and sambo were popular at one time. both equally offensive but if adopted today neither black or white could claim offence or feel marginalised in relation to the opposite group, if you get my gist honkey boy.

Yes, I get it.
I like that feeling of being marginalized in relation to the opposite groups. The wider the margin, the better. Seeing all those white faces in Poland never got boring.

BTW, wouldn't it be lovely if the invading hordes, both in Europe and here, truly hated whites and stayed as far away as possible? I hear that with that global warming in full swing you can grow bananas at the South Pole. Or is banana hate speech now?

What about mumbo-jumbo?

All words, with time, can gain a positive or negative meaning. By itself, no word is "racist" - those people who give the word bad energy may be racists though.