#avoidance speech

[tuulikki]

I read a fun article about how some European languages don’t use the usual Indo-European form for the word “wolf” of having either a w- or a v- word.

Instead, a lot of languages apparently are doing the same avoidance speech thing that we’re all familiar with from the word “bear” in many Germanic, Baltic, Uralic, and Slavic languages, which had a taboo on saying the real Indo-European word for “bear.” The real word is usually along the lines of ursus or artos or arktos as you find in Romance and Celtic languages.

But, in almost an exact reverse of the arktos-avoidance lineup, a lot of Romance and Celtic languages avoid the PIE *wĺ̥kʷos. Instead, Romance languages change some of the sounds, the way we change “damn” to “darn” to avoid actually saying the former. They use lupus (Latin) or lúkos (Ancient Greek). And the Celtic languages use a lot of poetical euphemisms.

So I guess in places where there weren’t a lot of bears but there were still plenty of wolves, people avoided saying the name of that top predator.

Meanwhile, all the languages from Bear Country were totally fine chatting about wolves, because who’s gonna be scared of the Big Bad Wolf when there are honest-to-God 300 kilo/600 lb genuine murder machines like bears in the fuckin woods

[principleofplenitude]

A geographically widespread practice known as avoidance speech, or “mother-in-law languages,” imposes strict rules on how one speaks — or doesn’t — to the parents of a spouse, with daughters-in-law typically bearing the brunt of such limits. In parts of Africa, Australia and India, some societies restrict the words a person can say after marriage. Some cultures have even barred all direct communication with parents-in-law. Some married women who speak the Kambaata language of Ethiopia follow ballishsha, a rule that forbids them from using words that begin with the same syllable as the name of their father-in-law or mother-in-law. This rule can complicate a conversation, but there are workarounds. Certain basic words in the vocabulary come in synonymous pairs. “One is the normal term, used by everybody; one is the term used by women who are not allowed to say that word,” said Yvonne Treis, a linguist at a French research institute, Languages and Cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa. Why did the custom of avoidance speech arise? Some experts on its use in Africa and India see it as a way to reinforce the inferior status of daughters-in-law. In Australia, the prohibitions might have been intended to reduce the chance of sexual relations between in-laws.

“Talking to In-laws Can Be Hard. In Some Languages, It’s Impossible.” from New York Times

[linguisten]

Hey, I was just wondering if you could elaborate on the topic of avoidance registers that you mentioned in the last ask. It sounds super interesting, but I've never heard of it before. Thank you :)

[referring to this Q&A]

Many languages of Africa and Australia did or do have special registers, basically a parallel lexicon but the same grammar rules as the "main” language. These registers have to be used according to culture-specific rules, e.g. when referring to certain people and/or when talking while these certain people are within earshot. Quite regularly cross-linguistically, these “certain people” include parents-in-law of the opposite sex.

I am more familiar with the Australian type of these registers. These are characterized by the fact that there are no one-on-one correspondences of lexical items, but rather hyperonymic relations: Often, the avoidance registers are using terms with a much more generic scope of meaning(s), where such a corresponding generic term may lack in the default register. (This has been described e.g.for Dyirbal in Dixon 1972.)

Another interesting case is Damin, the avoidance register of Lardil. It was* the only languoid outside of Africa which had phonemic clicks.

*) yes,past tense,unfortunately,such systems are among the first to be lost in language death

For more:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lardil_language

[bidaubadeadieu]

Interesting types of slang and word-generation processes.

Cockney rhyming slang originated in 19th century London, and was a kind of word replacement based on rhyming phrases, but with nonintuitive omissions. I’ll follow wikipedia’s example. Telephone rhymes with the phrase “dog-and-bone” but only the nonrhyming word is used, so “phone” was replaced with “dog.” Similarly, feet rhymes with “plates of meat” so speakers could say “I’ve been running all day, my plates are sore.”

In contemporary French, there is a slang feature called verlan (which is, itself, verlan for l’envers, meaning inverse) where you switch a word’s syllables to give a slightly new meaning. Femme (two syllables, feh-muh), meaning wife, became meuf, informally meaning your girl. Arabe, an adjective meaning Arab, became beur, referring to first-generation immigrants from Southwest Asia and North Africa. Recently, the twice-verlanized form rebeu, has grown to mean a second-generation Arab immigrant.

Somewhat similarly, across parts of Eastern and Southern Africa, some cultures practice avoidance speech. Two systems, ballishsha in parts of Ethiopia and hlonipha in parts of South Africa, are used to replace the names of people you respect (like predominantly the parents of your spouse) with rhyming words, paraphrase around the names, or incorporate clicks into the name, so as to technically avoid saying it. This trend encouraged borrowing words that sounded similar to the name you were trying to avoid from other nearby languages.

Please reblog this post with any more unique systems of active language evolution and slang-generation! My inbox is also open.