Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

I love that the comparative genetic data can illuminate some interesting information this way.

One thing that jarred to me as I read the article: the capitalization of what to me are not proper nouns, like "Indigenous peoples", "Traditional Histories", "Oral Traditions" or "Native". Other capitalizations seemed like the standard capitalization of proper nouns in English e.g. "Na-Diné". For example I consider myself an immigrant, not an Immigrant.

Is this just a quirk of the author or is this a kind of jargon in anthropology? To me it certainly gave the otherwise fascinating article a whiff of "1066 and all that".

View on HN

It's a form of modern institutional racism. See the AP's argument for capitalizing 'Black' but not 'white' https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-cultures-race-and-e.... It's obviously nonsense, done for political reasons and a misuse of the English language.

> It's obviously nonsense, done for political reasons and a misuse of the English language.

Is there any chance that people who have different opinions than you might have other motives or legitimate ideas?

>Is there any chance that people who have different opinions than you might have other motives or legitimate ideas?

Of course! But in this case, it is absolutely europhobic, anti-White racism. It's the racism de jure that's all the rage today among academia and inteligencia.

I refer to this as the "things I consider important/am passionate about" capitalization style, which happens to be popular in Government.

>>"Na-Diné"

Only it is Na-Dene(because it is constructed word - just like Google, Meta, Apple, and Giigle, Mita, Ipple could be names of different companies - and in the case of article to something else, that is only in the head of author) and this and other mistakes are making me look on sapiens.org as entertaining article and not scientifically reliable source. I would suggest for everyone to read something else on that topic - this is close to the truth, but nothing new and can not be regarded as news.

It's mostly a jargon thing to distinguish that they're using an academic term of art rather than just colloquial lay term.

Thanks! Some people consider jargon exclusionary, but really between two people in a field it is simply a way of saving time and removing ambiguity (as in this case).

So I don’t feel opressed by this jargon: it’s just extra domain-specific info that whooshed over my head.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com