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"The Teeth in Nouns"

Going to a gathering in a synagogue, my partner said something about the ‘Jew party’. This raised a tiny heckle, but I couldn’t see why. She’d invited me to a gathering with her community. Most were Jewish, some brought non-Jewish partners (like she brought me). What’s the problem?

Her native language is Slavic, and all the Slavic languages I know prefer nouns over adjectives. Where Anglophones say ‘he works as a police officer’, or ‘she is black’, Slavic languages would normally construct this as ‘he is a cop’, or ‘she is a…’ - and we have another oddity.

Look at this sentence:

She is a black.

This sentence has large teeth, on display. It takes the natural adjective form (‘she is black’) and twists it into a noun. The moment we (‘we’ meaning something like ‘reasonable, sensible, Anglophones’) hear this, we’re waiting for something bad to follow. The sentence construction makes a threat.

But we don’t need this grossly-American construction to feel the teeth.

Take this next one:

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I chatted with the barman last night.

“Oh?”, you might respond, absent-mindedly, half-listening.

Did you know he’s Jewish?

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This sounds like a ‘fun fact’ kind of story. Not enough to write home about (how do you write home nowadays? Post on Facebook?), just chatting about people you know. But once the noun’s there, everything shifts.

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I chatted with the barman last night.

“Oh?”, you might respond, absent-mindedly, half-listening.

Did you know he is a Jew?

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Once again, heckles up, and you’re waiting to see if this person will instruct you on the ‘real Truth’, straight from Youtube.

Of course, there’s nothing much to this whole story - it’s just one of those small cross-cultural miscommunications. Slavic languages prefer the noun, and their nouns don’t have teeth. These constructions do not indicate teeth - these are simply details that come from Anglican culture, rather than the language itself.

I still feel those teeth, because of my Anglophone inclinations, and then try to snap out of it. A similar event crops up whenever Anglophones arrive in Belgrade, and try to correct the locals when they hear the word ‘gypsy’.