Message: 3 Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 11:46:44 -0400 From: "Matt M." matt_mcl@sympatico.ca Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Culte, cult, secte, sect To: wikipedia-l@Wikipedia.org Message-ID: 000f01c36e44$bfc38840$0200a8c0@oemcomputer Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

"Cult" is more often used to refer to deviant

religious groups,

heretics with significant doctrinal differences.

Outsiders sometimes

tend to believe, without a stitch of evidence that

the cultists do weird

things like drinking blood or engaging in orgies.

I haven't researched the matter, but my impression

is that in French

"culte" is far more socially acceptable.

I would use the French "secte" to translate "cult" in the sense of "antisocial cult." When Heaven's Gate, the Solar Temple, etc., are mentioned in the French-language media, or when they ask "Is such-and-such a little religious group a cult or not?" the word they use is "secte."

In English, "sect" means a denomination of a religion; I would probably translate it as "d�nomination" or something similar. ("Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist or Northern Conservative Reform Baptist?")

"Culte" in French means worship, as in "heures de culte" (hours of prayer/worship/mass at a church). English sometimes uses "cult" for this, as in "the cult of the goddess Athene" in ancient Greece, meaning the worship of Her, but it's rarer and, in view of the pejorative meaning of cult, seems to be dwindling and increasingly able to be misunderstood. (I would probably not want to refer the "the cult of the Goddess" within earshot of any Pagan - and I am one!) "Worship" is probably the best translation of "culte".

Matt

Thanks Matt and Ec

That is a tricky word, not to mistranslate unintentionnally :-)

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