Thus in many languages, a name is an inalienable possession and is assumed to be an inseparable part of the body. Other properties of personal representation such as mind, spirit, soul, shadow and reflection are often treated in the same way and this can have repercussions for the grammar cf. Chappell and McGregor []. Furthermore true names are often secret, rendering euphemistic names necessary for public naming and addressing. In many places, names of the dead are or were until recently taboo.
Sometimes the ban extends to those personal names that the dead person may have given to others. Violations of such taboos are believed to cause misfortune, sickness and death; they may also cause offense to living descendants.
In this way, naming taboos can be extended to become word taboo. Simons [], for example, describes how of a sample of 50 Austronesian languages which are known to have some sort of naming taboo, 25 of these have a name taboo that extends into common word taboo. A further 18 have a taboo whereby words even resembling the tabooed names are taboo themselves. On Santa Cruz part of the Solomon Islands , where there is a taboo against using the name of certain affines, names consist of a common word, normally with a gender-marking prefix.
Sounds turn up in odd places; they mutate unexpectedly. Words are often funny-looking. Here you might compare the situation where the urge to swear in polite company drives an English speaker to spontaneously change shit to shite or fuck to fudge. There is also a high rate of borrowing, even among core vocabulary items that that are not generally borrowed. Under normal circumstances why would speakers need to take kinship terms or pronouns from another language?
It is precisely these established common-usage words that historical linguists trust when it comes to establishing genetic relationships and reconstructing lost stages of languages though in the case of pronouns, phonological wear and tear is such that the surviving fragments may not reveal much. Yet, in this context even basic vocabulary of this kind cannot be relied on to remain stable. Extensive borrowing and taboo-induced remodelling make it difficult to determine the chronology of linguistic changes that have occurred.
Irregular sound shifts have the effect of accelerating vocabulary differentiation between genetically related languages and can create a false impression of long divergences, in some cases even hiding genetic connections. Take the following vocabulary correspondences between Kwaio and Lau also Solomon Islands provided by Simons [ ]. However, there is no conditioning factor for this regular g:d correspondence, and Kwaio has doublets for gani, gamu and guigui which are identical with the Lau forms.
The explanation for this kind of common irregular sound change is to be found in the capricious mechanisms of word tabooing, not in regular inheritance from the proto-language. In many traditional Australian Aboriginal communities, any kind of vocabulary item, including grammatical words, can be proscribed if it is the same as, or phonetically similar to, the name of a recently deceased person.
Subsequently, this term was itself tabooed and replaced by either English mi or by ngayu borrowed back into the language from dialects where it had never been tabooed cf. Dixon [ 29]. This shows that the taboo on a word may cease after some years have passed, allowing it to come back into use. This recycling is one of the very few ways in which a former tabooed item can itself become a euphemism and is another dent in the notion of absolute taboo.
Linguists Alpher and Nash claim that, where the history is clear, such cases of death-tabooing have always proved to be temporary The taboo on a word may cease after some months, or one or two years have passed, allowing the word to come back into use. Moreover, it appears that there is no absolute prohibition on mentioning the name of a dead person. Vocabulary is taboo for only those people who stand in a certain relationship with the dead person. Locals can continue to use the taboo forms out of earshot of the bereaved family.
Understandably, in the fieldwork context it would be natural, the polite thing to do, for an informant to provide the outside field-worker with the avoidance terms. This could well give an exaggerated impression of severity of the taboo and the extent of the vocabulary replacement rate. However, even allowing for exaggerated accounts, it is clear from the endeavours of historical linguists that this kind of naming taboo can have a profound effect on the vocabularies of these languages.
Many researchers working on languages in Australasia and the Pacific have noted the difficulty of identifying regular sound correspondences between cognate or related forms But of course, these speech communities are not closed to innovation either, and they are certainly not closed to importing cultural elements from the outside.
As earlier described, taboos and attitudes towards taboo violation do change over time and many of these old taboos are now disappearing, having been affected by the spread of Western ideas. And yet, the practice of onomancy interpreting names as omens is still alive and well. Think of the occasional punter at the track who selects a horse simply because its name has some special significance.
Perhaps it links with a recent event or significant person. Many experience difficulty when they have to say out loud their own name; this is not confined to young children. When someone misspells our name, they touch a soft spot. From a very early age children learn the effectiveness of name-calling, often upsetting their peers by focusing on physical aspects square eyes, fatty but also playing with aspects of their names changing Burridge to Porridge. We are our names and insulting names do hurt.
Perhaps its because many English names carry sound symbolic associations. Research by Cutler, McQueen and Robinson [], for example, reveals that quintessential male names are short often single syllable and end in a stop consonant, while female names are typically longer, involve sonorous consonants and often a strong high front vowel.
Of course, there is also the fact that names come and go. Any fashionable name such as Jason and Kylie would reveal something of the age of a person. The fact that there are also traditional names such as Susan and John and novelty names such as Sky and River may also help us assess the attitudes of the name bearer, or perhaps more so those of the name giver.
But studies carried out on the reactions of speakers to names also reveal that many of us go beyond this and actually do link names with certain personalities cf. Dunkling []. It is all part and parcel of our general stereotyping behaviour. Certain names make us recall the personality of individuals that have that name. The name then somehow seems to fit that personality: Marys are quiet, Davids are strong, Kylies are sexy and so on. When we encounter that name in a stranger, it generates a certain expectancy.
It becomes one of the clues we use to access information about that persons social background or personality. Such stereotypes can be positive, negative, accurate or completely wrong-headed, but they are all of them selective. If speakers have come to associate certain personality traits with a certain name, when they encounter a person with that name, then they will see what they want to see.
The features they take note of will be those that confirm expectations. These will overshadow other features and become the main characteristics of that person.
In fact, studies of stereotyping show that people even go beyond the information that they are given. They see features that are not there and fail to see the ones that are.
Ours is a culture that promotes personal names. Name-dropping is believed to give us social clout. People dispose of their names and adopt new ones to promote a better public image. People can even sell their names, as when someone endorses a commercial product. Those that buy the item expect to pay more to have the name inscribed on the goods.
We have numerous phrases such as make a name for oneself; have a good name; bring ones name into disrepute; clearing ones name and so forth. Personal names can also lose their capital letter and enter the general lexicon as household words.
There are the usual eponyms such as cardigans and sandwiches from the Earls of Cardigan and Sandwich. English has amassed more than 35, of these expressions Trahair [ 9] , but even more telling are the eponymic phrases that arise spontaneously in everyday language. Most are short-lived, it is true, but their pervasiveness speaks to the value of names.
How different our media conscious 21 st century seems, where everyone is out there striving to be a name. And yet what we see here is simply a different side of the same coin.
Whether they are revealed or concealed, names are highly charged vocabulary items — they have power and mystique. Anyone wanting to know about taboo and language would have been compelled to seek out specialist anthropological accounts or what were assumed to be vaguely disreputable journals such as Maledicta.
In the name of decency and decorum, discussions of taboo, even within historical linguistic textbooks, focused on remote examples involving primitive word magic and taboos on dangerous animals. The following account of taboo was fairly typical for the time:. Words may cease to be used by a speech community due to the development of a taboo.
A taboo word is one which has come under prohibition, usually because of the sacred status of the reference of the word in question or because of fear inspired by the referent.
When taboos develop, some other word or phrase, usually a descriptive term, is generally called upon to replace the forbidden word. If modern western obscenities cracked a mention at all it was in coy reference to the indelicate connotations of words such as leg and thigh Anttila [ : ]. Taboos, whether they be the so-called absolute taboos of Austronesia or the social taste constraints of Western-style taboos, are an enormously important force behind language change through 1 word loss 2 meaning shift of terms already in the language via metaphor, general-for-specific, internal borrowing and so on , 3 deliberate modification of existing terms, 4 external borrowing.
Word tabooing processes act as some kind of linguistic wild card and militate against the operation of regular predictable change. Consequently, they can play havoc with the conventional methods of historical and comparative linguistics, which operate on principles such as the regularity of sound change, the non-borrowability of core vocabulary and the non-existence of true synonyms. Taboo even undermines one of the very cornerstones of linguistics; namely, the arbitrary nature of the word.
Yet, when it comes to taboo, the arbitrariness falls away and language users behave as if there were a very real association between sound and sense. Even across languages, these words are able contaminate others, bringing down innocent bystanders that just happen to sound similar e. Moreover, taboo senses have a saliency that dominates and frequency kills off all other senses of any language expression recruited as euphemism; those that escape this contamination have special properties.
Psychological and neurobiological research even supports the fact that we process taboo language differently from other language, with considerable differences with respect to recall and recognition — forbidden words are in-built, hard-wired into the deep limbic systems of our brains cf.
It is the sociocultural setting that creates obscenity and gives it meaning. Whether it is a matter of naming dangerous animals, uttering four letter words, striking a saucy trope to arouse or modest metonym to conceal, language users are aware of the potency of these expressions.
Modern speakers of English share with their ancestors a profound respect for the close relationship between word and meaning and this remains a powerful motive for language change. Dixon Robert M. Dunkling Leslie Anne, Whats in a Name? Gordon David P. Halliday Michael A. Hock Hans H. Jeffers Robert J.
Keesing Roger M. Loftus Elizabeth F. Like euphemisms, innuendos are used to discuss something unpleasant or inappropriate without directly stating the unpleasant or inappropriate subject. Whereas euphemisms soften the harsh reality, innuendos hint at the reality. She has a womanly figure. Although understatements and innuendos work similar to euphemisms, they are different due to the intention: whereas understatements and innuendos can have a variety of intentions, euphemisms always aim for politeness and avoidance of dirty or inappropriate talk.
They soften difficult truths and allow for polite conversation. List of Terms Action. Ad Hominem. Alter Ego. APA Citation. Comic Relief. Deus ex machina. Double Entendre. Dramatic irony. Extended Metaphor. How can we prevent jargon in communication? Is that a euphemism for something? What is the real meaning of euphemism friendly fire? What is the literal meaning of collateral damage?
Why is it called friendly fire? The word sex and all other terms which relate to it are avoided in SD, especially when young children are present, and for this reason, speakers tend to manipulate the language to convey the message indirectly. In addition to what has been mentioned above, there are some marking expressions which are used before certain words to euphemize them.
Mentioning a dog, for example, is not used in a pure context but should be attached to another phrase such as kalb Allah yekremk [dog, may Allah purify you]. The same goes with other animals such as donkey and pig.
Other things, such as filthy and dirty things, are used in the same style. These data from both dialects show how speakers tend to use euphemism in relatively the same way. Speakers of the Hijazi dialect and the Southern region dialect, for instance, tend to use metaphor to euphemize taboos or, in some situations, speakers use slang or colloquial terms to avoid taboos.
Moreover, semantic changes are used to replace offensive or more direct words or expressions. In addition, these two dialects share some features with other languages and dialects when the topic is death. This paper has focused on how euphemism is used to avoid directness in certain situations. The study has been conducted on two dialects which are used in Saudi Arabia; one is Hijazi which is used in Makkah while the other one is the Southern region dialect used in Alqunfudah.
The purpose was to find out how these two dialect speakers use euphemism to speak about some taboo issues such as death, sex, body parts, and bodily functions. It can be clearly stated, from what has been described in this paper, that people always manipulate language in order to avoid being harsh and direct. However, there are many aspects of euphemism which are also used in these dialects, for example, phonemic replacement, compounding, derivation, and deletion which need further investigation.
International Researchers, 2, Forbidden Words. Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dar AlkitabAlarabi. Al-kinayahwa T-tareed. London: Bloomsbury. Communicative Functions of Euphemism in Persian. The Journal in International Social Research, 5, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP. Mother or Maid? An Introduction. Enright Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
International Journal of Innovative Interdisciplinary Research, 2, International Journal of Linguistics, 6, Essentials of Introductory Linguistics.
USA: Blackwell Publishers.
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