h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

i know on official forms they have

Asian
&
Chinese

and i only did 'o' level geography, but china was a part of Asia back then

when did it split off from mainland Asia???

Clive : Post 20

"Incidentally Taff, there is a difference between spades and shovels; though I forget which way round this goes: one has raised sides on the blade that stop the dirt falling of the sides."

A Shovel has raised sides. It's because a shovel is designed to move things (coal, dirt, broken glass etc), and a spade is designed for digging.

Taff - Yes that is weird, but kind of goes to my point that these categories are frequently conflated or possibly, like I'm trying to understand about 'ethnicity', some kind of unclear summation of other categories but which are essentially, it seems so far, cultural in nature.

Thatprat- that's it! Thanks.

i think ethnicity is the difference between peoples who when lined up in an identity parade are indistinguishable from each other

ethnic Albanians in the Balkans for example

or tutsies and hutus in central Africa

and TPTB have blurred the lines by trying to be PC within several different departments all working to their own agenda with no central reference library of definitions

so now in Britain you can use cultural, ethnic, racial etc. and they have all come to mean the same

i think this is one of the ways a language evolves until we are all using the same words and the others have fallen out of usage and been cosigned to the dustbin of history

Something occurred to me last night. We used to hear 'ethnic' quite often in the context of a group of people who live in one country whilst having historical & cultural links with another country. Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Ethnic Germans in Czeckoslovakia etc. We hear it again with Ethnic Kurds in Iraq & Turkey, this time linked to an area rather than a sovereign country.

Not sure that adds anything, but it was just a thought.

Yeah exactly is used in other contexts like "ethnic origins" - which why it makes me think it's describing something definite, hence my desire to have a definition that is intelligible and distinguishable from culture, nationality, race, religion and language. all of which seem to be perfectly stable and reasonable categories so I'm unclear why if ethnicity is a summation of these why it's needed.

And interesting point about language Taff, I hadn't considered that.

A trend towards imprecision - how odd.