Banning the Nazi ugly word "Indo-Germanic"

Question

The word "Indo-European" was coined by Young in the early 19th century. Some Germans like Bopp just translated it as "indo-europäisch", as most people do around the world. Unfortunately, to the dismay of people like Bopp, most German scholars preferred the crypto-nazi "indo-germanisch". We know how it all ended during WWII. And Bopp was all too aware that the word was an issue that did not bode anything good.
Some people on the site insist on imposing the nazi pseudo-translation "Indo-Germanic" in English.
My proposal:
1. posts or comments that contain that word should be either edited or deleted.
2. people who insist on using that word should be banned.

Answer 1

The word indo-germanic is not a Nazi term. It was coined by the Danish scholar C. Malte-Brun in its French form indo-germanique in 1800 and it has traditional usage throughout the 19th and early 20th century also in the anglophone literature. Moves to stamp it out from anglophone terminology were undertaken in the 1920ies before the raise of the Nazi movement to power.

The Nazis ideology wasn't about a linguistic supremacy (unlike some forms of French chauvinism), it was about an esoteric concept of "race" inspired by Helena Blavatsky and theosophic ideas. Their fondness with Aryans comes from there. I have no evidence that the word indogermanisch was used prominently by the Nazi movement (Arier and arisch were used a lot and were at the core of their propaganda). They did not care for linguistic affiliation or faith, their main obsession was race and racism.

Banning a word needs some solid evidence for its offensiveness. A logical short cut of the scheme: it is preferred German terminology, the German were Nazis, therefore it is Nazi is not sufficient.

Answer 2

I looked a bit into this: judging from the answers here and what I found online, the term is - yes - obsolete because when it was coined some languages had not been included yet.

So from the moment they started being included, the term started becoming less and less applicable, and it was then changed to Indo-european.

This is what seems to be the case and it's not enough to warrant a ban.

Answering to your specific requests:

1. posts or comments that contain that word should be either edited or deleted.

Deletion is for very specific cases and this is not one of them. You may propose an edit for the answer that uses the term incorrectly, but I'd kindly ask you to refrain from referring to political reasons and/or making accusations directed at the poster.

Simply stick to the fact that the term is now obsolete.

You should write this last point in the edit summary and I'd strongly suggest that you clarify this with the poster in the comments in case you're not sure.

2. people who insist on using that word should be banned.

Banning is a disciplinary action and has nothing to do with the content of the answers, but the behavior on the website.

If you see someone using the term "Indo-germanic" instead of using "Indo-european" (because you think it might be the correct one), then edit/downvote the answer and move on.

All things considered, I tagged the request as status-declined.

Answer 3

The main problem with your proposal is that it is too narrow, since it does not include quite an array of offensive words (which decency compels me to not list, but I assume you can imagine what kinds of words you mean). To be concrete, I will mention one: "Lapp".

Fairness dictates that people should be put on notice what words are forbidden (probably many people are ignorant of the status of the previously mentioned word), so a preliminary step is assembling a list. As for banning, that might be theoretically possible under the new CoC, but will require buy-in from Stackexchange administration.

Editing wars are a bad idea, but one possible means of eliminating expressions that offend someone.

Answer 4

disclaimer: I offer no solution nor is it my intention to impose some kind of terminological Diktat - I will leave this up to our mods. My only hope is to offer a constructive discussion and to raise one's awareness of some terminological conventions in professional linguistic research done in English and awareness of connotations of certain words in present-day English.

Here are my thoughts on this. The question is about the use of the term "Indo-Germanic" in English, not in German.

I am not going to discuss the origin of the term itself or how specifically it was used by the ideologues of the Third Reich in Nazi Germany - this is well-known to linguists and a lot of research has been written on this, in English, Italian, etc. and even in German - for example, see the quote below from Kahane 1987:

The fact is that the term "Indo-Germanic" is no longer used by the international professional linguistic community, whether their L1 is English or German or any other language.

This is a convention of the English language, a terminological convention adopted by professional linguists, and frankly, one's insistence on using "Indo-Germanic" in English in 2019 does indeed look rather suspicious.

As Ruth Römer, a German linguist, the author of the monograph “Sprachwissenschaft und Rassenideologie in Deutschland” (1985), wrote:

“Heute gibt es keine deutsche Sprachwissenschaft mehr, es gibt nur noch eine internationale.”

Let me pose another, very important question. How may it affect the reputation of Linguistics SE, its perception?

For a linguist - be it a full-fledged researcher or just an undergrad student - this is a sign of amateurism, i.e. they would not find Linguistics SE particularly insightful or informative nor would they take it seriously. To a layperson who is interested in linguistics, especially in historical linguistics, this would be a disservice because it misrepresents the field of historical linguistics, esp. its present-day conceptual, terminological apparatus.