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)

I happened to have a searchable copy of The Arab Lands in the Ottoman Era (ed. Jane Hathaway; Minneapolis: Center for Early Modern History, U. of Minn., 2010), which is a collection of articles by about a dozen scholars who can be expected to know what current academic usage, at least, is, and who presumably would be careful not to give offense. They consistently use "Arabic" to mean the language, and otherwise use "Arab" as the adjective (as in the book's title).

More pertinently to this discussion, the four of them who actually refer to Arab people, either as individuals or as a group, all use "an Arab" or "Arabs" as nouns, rather than saying "an Arab person" or "the Arab people". One other author, who extensively discusses mutual stereotypes between Turks and Arabs, puts "Turk" and "Arab" into irony-quotes to emphasize that he is talking about the stereotype rather than about actual people of those ethnicities.

So, based on this sample, it would appear safe to use the noun "Arab(s)" when referring to people, at least in current academic usage. For other viewpoints, I wonder whether advocacy groups such as the Arab American Institute might offer advice on usage? Bruce M. Tindall 16:13, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

(One other data point -- Chicago Manual of Style uses "Arabs" (and "Jews") as examples, although not specifically in context of whether they should be used as nouns, but rather in a section on capitalization. I don't have copies of the NY Times or AP style books at hand but maybe they say something more detailed about this?) Bruce M. Tindall 16:18, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

And the Guardian's stylebook (2007 edition, http://www.scribd.com/doc/3448998/UK-Guardian-Style-Book-2007) seems to think "Arab" as noun is OK; their discussion centers on the definition of the noun, rather than whether it should be rendered as "Arab people" etc. Bruce M. Tindall 16:23, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

I have the 1976 version of the NYT style manual, although it was printed much later. They don't have an actual header called Arab but they do have headers (and text) for a number of similar listings, including their longest one, Arab names and titles. In paragraph three of the text, on page 16, we read, "A Moslem Arab has at least three names...." So here they are clearly using it in the sense of "Arabs used to ride camels, now they drive cars." I probably should get an up-dated version -- language usage does change. For instance, the manual says not to use "gay" for "homosexual" except when it's capitalized as the name of an organization. Today the NYT *always* uses "gay" as an adjective. Hayford Peirce 16:36, 31 January 2011 (UTC)