2y ago

TIL that the Māori word for autism is "Takiwātanga" meaning "their own time and space." I also learned that it's not without controversy (see inside).

I thought the word and the definition sounded beautiful, but then I also learned that it was coined in 2017 and has been accused of imposing outside culture. Namely, here is a criticism I found on Twitter and Reddit but without further attribution or detail:

Just wanted to share and see what the community thought about it.

31 comments

- One of my kids name translated directly to English is “destroyer of houses”, however the meaning behind it is a guardian and protector.
  I know which I prefer!
  Thanks for the background.
- One of my kids name translated directly to English is "destroyer of houses"...
  lol 🤣🤣🤣... well, I'm sure some nice construction worker lady will make a great wife 🤣🤣🤣
- Thank you for weighing in! What you said makes a lot of sense.
- One of my kids name translated directly to English is “destroyer of houses”
  In my experience, this describes children perfectly lol
- Thanks for the insights. Languages that contain a lot of metaphor in everyday speech are really interesting.
I find it hard to blame people for bad use of characters that they don't have on their keyboard layouts. I'm French speaking, I don't care if you're not putting an accent on "échelle" when writing to me in a casual conversation, I understand you mean "ladder" when you write "echelle".
Edit: Makes me think, I myself am often just working on something with the US layout at the same time as communicating in French, and not wanting to juggle between layouts, I just skip accents.
- In Scandinavian languages, åäöæø are not even accents. They're completely separate letters. And substitutions can lead to entirely different words. It still used to be common to see ao used instead when a lot of systems had problems with anything other than 7bit ASCII. (Mostly Microsoft, of course.)
  On the other hand there were things like TV shows where names might be transliterated, so Pääkkönen might become paeaekkoenen which is text gore, but might have some chance of getting pronounced remotely right.
  Oh and the generally "funny" feature especially in dumb phones where the so called Microsoft alphabetical order would put ä first in a list instead of nearly last.
  
  I understand, but I also don't have å or ø in my language, so my mental mapping is gonna be "a" and "o".
  
  It seems like a poor latinization system to use the same characters used for accented letters to represent those different letters
- Thank you, I appreciate this as someone who speaks two languages of which neither has accents.
  Edit: I'm sorry, you guys, I just realized my fucking native tongue has some rarely used accents. I am not a smart woman. And I agree that if someone omitted them, I would still understand what they meant.
  
  This is probably not relevant, but if you use Gboard on your Android device, you can long press for accents e.g. Pokémon
  
  Even English has a handful of words with accents. "Naïve" comes to mind. Of course, most people ignore those accents.
- I'm German myself but since I am a programmer I like the US-Keyboard more than the German one. The easy fix for me was using US-intl-nodeadkeys so I can use the right alt key to type those stupid German umlauts. This should work at least for most (Western-)European languages.
- I got tired of switching keyboards so I learned the slt codes for common accents. Saves time and there are only really a handful of common ones that you need for the average message
It sure sounds nice, but man if only it felt like a gift of treasure inside my head. It's a curse more than anything.
- I wondered if this would be the sentiment, at least partially. Do you feel like the autism itself is the curse or more the way society treats autistic people? Like, if you could have a neurodivergent-friendly society, would you still hate it?
  
  I'm not autistic (well, probably - I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until my thirties because mental health was taboo in Ireland) but am ND and so is my son. It's hard to know how to thread this line with him. A world that catered for ADHD would be a nice one to live in, it might even set us up for success by giving us the roles we're good at. But this isn't that world, and NT people aren't any more to blame for growing up in a world that has been shaped for millenia by NT people. You can be educated about neurodiversity but they can't see inside an ADHD brain any more than I can see inside an autistic brain (again... Probably).
  Even in a simple, small, and flexible society, there would be downsides to ADHD. Acceptance and patience isn't going to solve rejection sensitivity. New measures of success aren't going to solve dopamine deficiency. I assume there are sides of autism that all the love and acceptance in the world won't make a blessing.
  Gifted the head is something like what ADHD people get patronisingly called too when someone looks for a saccharin label. I would dislike it. The newer term sounds far closer to neurodivergent which - and it's new-ish still for me at my age! - better gives a short and non-judgemental statement - brain different.
  
  As someone that can still live a somewhat normal life, I am of course far less negative feeling about my autism. But I know many people that can't get their body to do what they want it to do in the very least. And while they have many good days and do enjoy some of the benefits of autism, overall they are certainly not as positive about theirs as I am with mine.
  For me, just hanging out with other like-minded people gets rid of any negatives I have with mine. But some have much greater challenges that can't be mitigated by even a specially crafted environment and comfortable social situations.
  
  Would hate it with a passion. I could never persue my dreams because of a fucked up brain. How lucky you'd have to be, if social acceptance is your only concern.
- It also has the ring of being called "special" or something as a euphemism. It's not a title I think would be pleasant.
  But it's a different language, so there's no way for a non speaker to tell what it sounds like there.

31 comments