Talk:Arab

Redlink

I'm not sure whether to redlink 'Arabia' or 'Arabian Peninsula'. Ro Thorpe 04:59, 15 January 2008 (CST)

Title

Arab people a better title? John Stephenson 11:59, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Maybe. Or possibly Arabic people. There are a lot of ethnic names (like "Kurd" or "Mongol" or "Sami" or "Inuit"), names for nationalities (like "America" or "Mexican" or "Greek" or "Russian"), religious names ("Hindu" or "Catholic" or "Muslim") that are used as both adjectives and nouns. My sense is that using such names as nouns is sometimes taken to be offensive. That's not always the case, though, as should be obvious from my lists. "Arab" is used a lot in the U.S. news, but I don't know enough if there are any connotations associated with the term for the people to whom it is applied. Unless there are such connotations, this is probably going to be an issue of standardization for the social science workgroups. --Joe Quick 15:30, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

As far as the geographic area, an al-Qaeda "franchise" is usually called "al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula." Don't know if I want to use A-Q as a reference, though. "Arabia", though, is too easy to confuse with "Saudi Arabia". Howard C. Berkowitz 17:30, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Okay, but that doesn't really address the issue. "Arabia" is clearly a noun. The question here is whether "Arab" is better used as a noun or an adjective. --Joe Quick 00:44, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

The use of 'Arab' as an adjective is restricted to meanings close to that of a person: an Arab woman, perhaps an Arab country, but probably not an Arab landscape or mountain or house. Joe says: '"Arab" is used a lot in the U.S. news' - in the plural as a noun, or as an adjective, I'd guess ('Arab land'). 'Arabic' is even more restricted, to the language, so Arabian people, not Arabic people (or perhaps the latter means 'Arabic speakers'). And there is the complication that Arabian is not a nationality, though Saudi Arabian is, technically - though we normally say Saudi... Ro Thorpe 01:29, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

(unident) Some time ago we had an argument on here about the 9-11 article, over a sentence which began: "Nineteen Arabs, members of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, hijacked..." I always feel that the noun is very difficult to use in a non-pejorative sense, except when discussing acts of peoples centuries ago. Speakers tend to avoid labelling people as "a German", or "an Italian", because it implies that they behave in a stereotypical and extreme way. The adjectival usage avoids this. John Stephenson 14:39, 31 January 2011 (UTC)