Thread by @AudreyTruschke

To suspend this professor is a horrifying example of Western hegemony, cultural ignorance, and anti-Chinese bias.

@USC -- There are words in lots of languages that sound off to English speakers. Learning and overcoming one's own biases are part of learning a foreign language.

A few examples -- Lahore.

I once had an English-only American tell me that Pakistan should change the name of Lahore, to avoid confusion in English. No joke. I responded: "Maybe you should learn Urdu."

Sikh. As in, imagine in an intro to South Asia course, "The person you see on this slide is Sikh."

Note that there is a clear difference between the Indian term (in many languages) "Sikh" and English "sick", but English-only speakers usually cannot hear the difference.

God help anybody speaking in Hindi who decides to borrow the Sanskrit word for city and say it with a Hindi pronunciation. I'd never thought of this until this USC thing.

tithi, meaning date in Sanskrit and Hindi.

Like with Sikh, this sounds different than the English word with which it might be mistaken, but English-only speakers might not hear the distinction.

Another example (borrowing from a reply on this thread) but goes the other way -- Randy.

Normal English name, but could be mistaken for something else in Hindi.

I'm going to cut off examples. In closing, let me return to my key point --

There are often sound similarities across languages, especially for those who only know one of the languages in play. We don't censor foreign languages because we mishear them in English. We learn. @USC