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Comment by onyva | Hacker News Reader

>> It was discovered by western science in 1911, when Yale professor Hiram Bingham III was tipped off to its existence by locals and led to the site, then overgrown with vegetation.

So... it wasn’t “discovered” by western science if it was known to locals all along... why not simply state that western scientist learned or were aided by locals into the site?

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I think you're misparsing the sentence. It just means that this is when it first became known to "western science".

No, it's not a mis-parse. It's a justified criticism of racist journalism.

I'm convinced; the author is clearly a racist because the people in this thread have a poor grasp of the English language. When is his execution?

Hyperbole. The right’s favorite pass time. Also, thinking their grasp of the English language is great. Ie trump being a perfect example.

This is about language though. Eurocentrism is about making everything relative to what the west thinks, even when it’s “understanding” is very limited. Like going to explore other cultures and reporting back with authority when there’s plenty of local expertise that should be sourced.

Take the theory of decline of the Ottoman Empire as an example to this type of anti-intellectualism, but there so many mistakes to learn from.

The particular sentence in the article is only slightly uncommon in terms of difficulty, so I don't really see how I've implied that my English is 'great'. Passable, maybe. We might have different standards.

Nice high-brow segue from "you're obviously a Trump supporter" to "civilisation is in decline due to anti-intellectualism", though. Hint: I'm British. Talk about ethnocentrism.

I'm not really sure how I can constructively help you with the sentence in question without literally parsing the tokens for you and identifying the parts of speech, objects, subjects, etc. Seems like that would be a waste of time, given you've already arrived at your own immutable conclusions.

In this case the journalist clearly meant "western science" was slow on the uptake and needed locals to point them on the way...and as late as 1911 at that!

It's whitewashing of the world .

Take for example the Monk Fruit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siraitia_grosvenorii

Known in China...but scientific name attributed to the westerner who "found it" in the 1930s.

It's very common if you are cognizant of it.

Hardly. We don't often use Chinese words in English regardless of the context, presumably because English speakers find the terms difficult to remember or hard to pronounce.

Chinese does exactly the same thing. I mean, is 盲文 [1] 'yellow' (euch--your terminology) washing? It meets the same standard.

And how about China claiming to have invented high-speed rail, mobile payments and ecommerce? [2] No cries of racism for that one? Strange.

There are many parallel examples.

Edit:

[1] 盲文 lit. blind language aka Braille in English, after its creator.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_new_inventions

What? I don't read Chinese but Google translate tells me that 盲文 is Braille, and individually it breaks down to "Blind text".

The same standard would be if China took the word "Braille" and then in Chinese, it is named after the first Chinese person who read Braille.

If you think English speakers have an easy time saying "Siraitia grosvenorii", the scientific name, named after the "discover" Grosvenor, then you have some serious delusions.

It's not whitewashing, it's academicwashing.

Something that is only known to locals can be discovered by the greater world.

If it was well-known to academics or other notable groups of non-locals inside the country then "discovered" would be less appropriate.

It was Columbused.

https://youtu.be/BWeFHddWL1Y

And then NPR Columbused Columbusing with this article:

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/07/06/328466757...

(This was an early example of the race-based cultural wars that have gotten huge on Twitter in the past few years.)

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