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kilobug comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions - Less Wrong Discussion
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Hum, it seems I made a language mistake - what I said about "race" definitely applies in French, but it seems it doesn't hold in English (while I was quite sure it was the same). So you can forget that part (but I left it and made the correction afterward for the posterity).
If I can ask : are the down votes only for that reason, or are they for my other remarks too ?
I can't answer about the downvotes because I didn't vote on your comment.
In French, is there a polite way to refer to what would be called "race" in English?
Yes, the politically-correct word is usually "ethnicités" and sometimes (in more formal or governmental contexts) "minorités visibles", at least in Québec (province). Someone is usually referred to as "d'ethnie (latino-américaine)" (for latino-americans, as an example) when their race is relevant / being discussed.
A thing that bothers me when using “ethnicity” and cognates as euphemisms for “race” and cognates is that in my mental lexicon the former are cultural clusterings and the latter genetic ones, so the biological children of a sub-Saharan couple adopted at a very young age and raised in (say) Denmark by a Danish couple would count has having “black” race but “white” ethnicity.
Well, yeah, that's always a problem. In more sophisticated texts where using the french word "race" is unacceptable, you'd have to find some more specific and specialized term (probably from genetics jargon) if you want to avoid the conflation with linguistic and cultural clustering.
In common usage, "ethnicité" is used and context allows us to infer that it refers to visible genetic variations rather than just cultural ones - it's rare that we'll refer to Americans as being from a different "ethnie", for example, unless in scientific contexts that pertain to populations. The usage is such that the context will usually make it very obvious which meaning is intended.
Maybe if there are enough people of color who've grown up in Denmark, then Danish is no longer a white ethnicity.
Also, I don't know whether the connotations of "ethnicite'" are the same as the connotations of "ethnicity".
How do you get the accent? I tried typing alt-0233, and my computer just beeped at the numbers.
For unusual characters, googling some sort of vague description and then copy-pasting from one of the first 5 results often works, e.g. 'e accent' or (as a purely contrived example) an eth (ð).
Or you can use a site like this which allows you to draw the character and then copy paste.
I copy the character from a character map.
I have an Italian keyboard. ;-) The Alt-nnnn thing only works with the left Alt key, the number keypad and only under Windows, AFAIK.
Mac laptops have alt+keyboard keys, so é would be alt+e then e if you're on a mac.
Ubuntu does the same with the Italian keyboard, only it's AltGr and , (comma) for the acute accent (which I use when I need one on a vowel other than E in languages other than Italian). I think it can be made to do the same with a US keyboard (where the right Alt becomes the AltGr).