Ashifa Kassam reports for the Guardian on some research that falls very much in the remit of this blog:
When researchers asked people around the world to list every taboo word they could think of, the differences that emerged were revealing. The length of each list, for example, varied widely. While native English speakers in the UK and Spanish speakers in Spain rattled off an average of 16 words, Germans more than tripled this with an average of 53 words ranging from intelligenzallergiker, a person allergic to intelligence, to hodenkobold, or “testicle goblin”, someone who is being annoying. […]
“These words can be more offensive, or less, they can be loaded with negativity or with irony,” said Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, a cognitive scientist and professor at Madrid’s Nebrija University. “But taken together, they offer small snapshots of the realities of each culture.”
When it came to the differences between Spanish and German speakers, Andoni Duñabeitia had two theories. German, with its seemingly endless capacity to build new compound words, could simply offer more options, he said. “But it could also be that some people [speaking other languages] just don’t have these words readily available, or it’s harder for them when asked to produce them in a very neutral environment,” he said.
The study, which looked at taboo words in 13 languages from Serbian to Cantonese and Dutch, and across 17 countries, revealed other differences. The word “shit”, or its translated equivalent, for example, ranked among the most frequently used in several languages, including English, Finnish and Italian, but was not in the top rankings in French, Dutch, Spanish or German.
In contrast, words that sought to disparage women, such as “bitch,” turned up across cultures. “I think it comes down to the terribly sexist traditions of many countries,” said Andoni Duñabeitia, who was among the four dozen researchers involved with the 2024 study. “The vocabulary reflects the reality of societies where women have been mistreated, removed from everyday tasks and relegated to the background.”
Click that last link for the study (which is open access); thanks, Trevor!
That one must be highly regional if it’s even real; its meaning is not compositional, Hoden is the medical term (only as taboo as the subject itself), and Kobolde do not come up in everyday conversation.
I haven’t come across Intelligenzallergiker either, but its meaning is immediately obvious; it’s probably been spontaneously coined a few times (by unusually creative people, but still).
The actual paper is much more sensible than the Grauniad article might suggest (in particular, they accepted set phrases, not just “words.”)
Africa is represented by Setswana alone. I suspect you’d end up with very different results with (say) Hausa, or even with Swahili. Further research is needed …
I haven’t encountered these two words either. To me they are somewhat silly, but hardly “taboo words”
Didn’t Ariane Grande call her female friends “my bitches” in one of her hits?
What this suggests to me (assuming the words are mainly real) is that German has a lower threshold for calling something taboo. (Either socially or linguistically – if instructions are given in local languages then presumably you can’t be sure that the word used for ‘taboo’ has the same force in every language.)
The actual paper is much more sensible than the Grauniad article might suggest
Well, duh, I’m a blogger, not a doctor, Jim! If it boasts, it posts, as we say.
Is Giftzwerg taboo? That is what I thought of on reading ‘Hodenkobold’.
Really? In the early 2000s there was a big hit in Germany called “Scheiße”. It was being played on the radio all the time, and children loved it. As far as I remember, there was no big scandal, nobody called for censoring the song (which was about men, btw). Compare the scandal caused in the UK in 1976 by the Sex Pistols-Bill Grundy interview. Just because John Lydon had said “shit” (he refused to repeat it) and Steve Jones had called Grundy “a fucking rotter”. On the other hand nobody complained that Grundy had been drunk and openly tried to flirt with the teenage girls in the Pistols’ entourage (Siouxsie was 19 at the time, Debbie Wilson 16).
In the nature of the case, I wouldn’t really expect to have an adequate knowledge of genuinely taboo Kusaal vocabulary, though one of my informants had no hangups in providing that kind of information, FWIW.
With that (extremely significant) caveat, my impression is that linguistic taboo doesn’t really reside in individual words (or set phrases) in Kusaal, but is more a matter of making remarks that are offensive in context.
I don’t think that abusive terms skew particularly anti-female in Kusaal; and banya’aŋ only ever means “female dog.” Most disobliging terms are thoroughly unisex (in line with the fact that the language makes no grammatical male/female distinctions.)
Kusaasi culture is no feminist paradise (traditionally polygamous, for one thing) but women do have a lot of autonomy compared with many traditional cultures.
Bin “shit” is certainly not taboo in Kusaal; it turns up in the Bible translation. (A venerable word: not only pan-Gur, but found in Potou-Akanic too.)
“Yeast” is translated as dabin “beer-shit” in Kusaal.* Though this is surely trumped by the Classical Nahuatl word for “gold, silver”, teocuitlatl “god-shit.”
* Makes more sense than you might think: bread is not a traditional food, so beer is really the only yeasty thing on the menu, and the lees of an older batch of beer are kept to be used for making the next batch.
Yeah, if “taboo” means “people would genuinely be shocked to hear this”, then little other than Nazi stuff is taboo in German. It looks like the Germans in this study just went for “insult”.
No, but the preferred version is Volkskanzler.
What was the Russian nickname for Yezhov that usually gets translated as “poison dwarf”?
Really?
Well, based on the evidence provided. There *is* at least one genuinely taboo word concerning intelligence in (my) English, but it’s hard to imagine that a phrase meaning ‘allergic to intelligence’ would be included in a list of taboo English terms.
Or what David M said.
I’m not sure you can reasonably compare 1976 in one country and the early 2000s in another.
Although ‘shit’ is kind of on the borderline for me – I would probably feel that I was *expected* to include it, but I wouldn’t feel self-conscious repeating it.
What I know is that supposedly he was called “bloody dwarf” – кровавый карлик. Although I doubt anyone dared to say this in his lifetime.
So all the time I was talking about Pale Fire on NABOKV-L, people thought I knew карлик meant “dwarf” and such, and didn’t bother to tell me.
Sixteen!!?? I was about to complain the English speakers can’t have been even trying. But I see the problem is the Guardian’s correspondent can’t read a bar chart.
Mutter, mutter, usual complaint that journalists — _if_ she’s even a journalist — think that when it comes to language they can write any old pisscrapfuckwittedshit.
Steve Jones had called Grundy “a fucking rotter”
an odd combination of Punk and PG Wodehouse.
It seems to me that there is genuine interest in comparing languages pairwise for what counts as taboo speech; moreover, doing it that way gives you space and time to see whether the variations correlate with other cultural features.* Doing that properly requires more than a few vague generalisations about “religion” or institutional misogyny or whatever. You’ll need to know about other social taboos, about demographics, demographic changes … all of this will be directly relevant. (I picked Hausa as a contrast to Setswana because Hausa L1 speakers are overwhelmingly Muslim: if that doesn’t significantly affect language taboos, then I’m a Zen Buddhist.)
“World” surveys, on the other hand, are likely to lose so much significant detail that you end up with something which is substantially less than the sum of its parts. (As with the many papers based on WALS, elaborate statistics cannot magically restore precision in such circumstances. Maths can’t bring back the information your methodology has stripped out.)
* I once read a very interesting article by Saul Bellow on how English and Yiddish differ in this respect.
In many traditional Australian cultures, saying anything whatsoever to your mother-in-law is completely taboo, and if she is in earshot, you need to change your vocabulary completely even to speak to anybody else.
I gather that in Japanese, the way to offend is not so much with provocative vocabulary choices but with inappropriate formality levels. Offensive verb flexion …
Both of which also illustrate that what counts as offensive is highly dependent on social context. (This is entirely familiar to English speakers too.)
To treat individual words or phrases as offensive in some absolute sense is already drastically oversimplifying matters. (This also seems to have led to speakers of different languages interpreting the rubric of the question very differently in some cases: they weren’t, in reality, answering the same question at all. “Taboo” is not a cross-cultural universal – by any stretch of the imagination.)
_if_ she’s even a journalist
She is (though evidently no Carole Cadwalladr):
https://intelligentrelations.com/journalist/ashifa-kassam/
No background relevant to linguistics, as far as I can see; but editors (with the shining exception of the Economist) seem generally to be unaware that linguistics is actually a thing, so it’s not really her fault.
And after all, this kind of thing is not as damaging as articles on economics written by journalists who know even less about economics than I do.
Cf. also mother-in-law speech taboo in California.
I am not in the habit of using offensive words. Others swear all the time. It is a matter of what habits you adopt, hardly a linguistic question.
Hodenkobold is a word I have never heard in the wild but it seems to have some currency as a meme in the DACh world if a quick Facebook/instagram search tells us anything (btw, I don’ t recommend searching for “Hodenkobold” on Instagram). Songs, pet hamsters, even a (apparently not very succesful) band.
It is a matter of what habits you adopt, hardly a linguistic question
When the habits involve word choice, that is certainly a linguistic question. Linguistics is not just the study of phonology, morphology and syntax.
Note that English (and I imagine many other languages) has a variety of pejorative and abusive terms that are usually applied only to males, side by side with others that are usually applied only to females.* In general, the reformers who have tried to make language more gender-neutral and inclusive have not focused their energies on that segment of the lexicon. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the dynamics of verbal abuse are completely egalitarian, of course, just that noting one phenomenon but not the other is not a good way to diagnose overall social dynamics.
*Including not only some that are of gender-marked etymology like “dickhead” but others that aren’t – it seems weird-to-downright-wrong in my idiolect to call a woman a “shithead,” for example, and not just (best as I can tell) because it violates some chivalrous-or-condescending politeness norm.
The issue is confused by the fact that there are proportionately fewer female shitheads than male, but I can nevertheless think of a few worthy candidates currently in the public eye.
“Dickhead” certainly seems incromulent if applied to a woman. Possibly the sense is not so much ascriptional as transpositional.
@de, jwb
I think there are also words that nominally should apply to females, but which are used as insults almost exclusively for males. My impression is that the C word (or even the less taboo “P” word) was used in these islands only to insult males, contrasting with the use of the B word, a “female” word used for women. I think bastard, like dickhead is male-only, and brat applies only to children, but children of both sexes. All this is probably changing anyway.
Note that English (and I imagine many other languages) has a variety of pejorative and abusive terms that are usually applied only to males, side by side with others that are usually applied only to females.
The difference, of course, is that the terms “usually applied only to males” are simply insults usually applied to males; when you call a guy a “dickhead” or a “shithead,” you’re impugning his character and behavior, not his gender. You wouldn’t say “I saw a bunch of assholes” just because they were male, you would be implying they were doing something assholish. Women are called bitches just for being female; people do in fact say “I saw a bunch of bitches” meaning simply that they were women.
The study’s raw data is available here: data/taboo_study1 in CSV and Excel form.
“hodenkobold” was offered by 3 (7.3%) of de-DE respondents. For comparison, the words with 4 (6.7%) of en-GB respondents seem all very mainstream to me, e.g.
chav
nonce
gippo
bint
crazy
paedo
pleb
poof
snowflake
weirdo
I do find the categorisation very patchy. Words can have up to 3 categories, but e.g. “good god” and “fucking hell” are only in “insult”, not “religion” or “sexual” (which were available) nor “exclamation”/”expletive” (no such option).
Oh, it’s a meme… soon we shall be familiar with all Internet traditions…
Link doesn’t work for me (although that could be a consequence of the ongoing disruption engendered by letting Jeff Bezos run half the internet.)
If I ever get to see it, I’ll be interested particularly in the Setswana stuff.
I do wish someone would seriously do a careful study of pejoratives in English or any other language. It frustrates me to see any and all equally glossed as “a despicable person” in dictionaries. It’s a tough problem. First, they don’t overlap semantically: a serial killer would not mainly be described as an asshole, though someone who harasses the waiters might. A semantic map treatment seems appropriate: what behaviors would make you worthy of being called a shithead but not an asshole? Second, a term used as an exclamation does not equal its usage as a noun. Offhand I’d say the vocative semantics are broader, but that takes investigation. Thirdly, the pragmatics are distinct: as was mentioned, referring to a woman as an asshole is odd and rare, whatever her behavior. Lastly, the semantic distribution of the various terms differs between individuals. Are there some universals though?
Plenty of serious research to be done, ha-ha factor aside.
Ed.: Further to the second point, there are more discourse-related distinctions: “He is such an asshole!” is unremarkable; “It is my opinion that he is an asshole” is odd.
Seen it. Doesn’t help much.
The sampling in general is vastly skewed toward SAE.
The stuff about how their sample includes all continents and the languages of two billion people is presumably meant to give an unearned air of cultural diversity.
The supplementary table about the backgrounds of the informants for Setswana suggests that they were all university students or “personal contacts” (of the investigator, presumably.) I would have thought that this was likely to lead to a sample highly unrepresentative of ordinary speakers’ culture: even more so in Botswana than in the US, where this is a notorious problem in psycholinguistic studies.
Like mollymooly, I wonder about the labelling. The supplementary materials suggest that everything not labelled “filler” counted as “taboo” in this study. That is considerably at variance with my L1 intuitions for many of the English examples. They don’t seem to mean “taboo” in the sense that I would use the word.
I know nothing of Tswana culture, but in Kusaal, at any rate, the equivalents of the Setswana words labelled “sexual” are not taboo. I wonder to what extent the Tswana students’ assessments were affected by their knowledge of English.
It occurs to me that modern SAE languages are relatively unusual in their heavy use of metaphor and metonymy even in quite everyday language.
In the remote era when I learnt Latin at school, this difference between Latin and English was something that primers of the lost art of Latin prose composition specifically pointed out: for example, “England expects every man to do his duty” doesn’t work in ordinary Latin prose, where such a personification of “England” would count as a distinctly poetic trope. We hardly notice that it’s a rhetorical figure at all, and happily say things like “the bank has sent me a stern letter” without a second thought.
So the fact that Kusaal banya’aŋ “bitch” or pɛn “vagina” are not used as insults may well simply reflect the fact that casual use of metaphor or metonymy is just not common in ordinary Kusaal discourse. (In the case of “bitch” it may also reflect a rather different cultural role for dogs, which are kept as guard dogs, not as pets, and have a quite different set of stereotypical attributes from SAE dogs.)
I was just looking at the interesting competitive flyting text in Anthony Agoswin Musah’s Kusaal grammar. There are a few examples of gratuitous references to naughty bits, e.g.
Zum sa giligi keŋ gɛŋin.
“Clitoris roamed at the funeral dance yesterday.”
But most of the insults are more like
M nɔya’aŋ gaŋ-gaŋ.
“My only fat female chicken.”
or indeed
M zɔŋin kugzĩdir.
“My yard’s sitting stone.”
This is highly stylised stuff rather than just mouthing off, but I think the point of zum “clitoris” in the first example is its inappropriateness in context, not intrinsic taboo-ness.
Conversely, Kusaal “proverbs” are so heavily metaphorical that they’re best learned as vocabulary; SAE proverbs tend to require a shorter chain of inference, if I may say so myself.
On the other hand, Kusaal proverbs are often quite far from everyday speech, particularly in their compression. Take e.g.
Adaa yɛl ka’ tiimm.
PERSONIFIER.TENSE not.be medicine.NEGATIVE
“Did-say is/has no remedy.” (i.e. there’s no use crying over spilt milk.)
This kind of use of the personifier particle a before verb phrases is very common in proverbs; another is
Awiak sɛong zi’ sinnɛ.
PERSONIFIER.hatch rainy.season not.know hawks.NEGATIVE
“The one hatched in the rainy season doesn’t know hawks.”
(You’re in a fool’s paradise.)
The syntax of these is not obscure, but this is by no means everyday language. This is genre stuff. The genre may overlap somewhat with the flyting style in Musah’s text, now I think of it. (Certainly, the point of some of these insults often seems far from obvious.)
I do wish someone would seriously do a careful study of pejoratives in English or any other language. It frustrates me to see any and all equally glossed as “a despicable person” in dictionaries. It’s a tough problem.
Agreed on all counts.
Also, it looks like somebody had fun with the letter O. A woody word of sorts.
I do wish someone would seriously do a careful study of pejoratives in English or any other language
Evidently an analysis in terms of semantic primes is called for. (“Elementary pejoritons”?)
I have actually seen something like this attempted with the various Yiddish-derived “idiot” words: schlemiel, schmendrik, schlimazzle etc.
Incidentally, the WP article on flyting tells us
Personally, I was more struck by “cunt-biter.” (The poem is indeed a virtuoso work.)
omeyn to Y!
(and thanks to DE for the important points on rhetorics in that direction)
i think a comparative (and, ideally, diachronic) look at rural northern new england and southern quebec invective/pejoratives would be an interesting starting case study – fairly similar social worlds and recent economic histories, but very different kinds of core vocabularies for cursing. (…had we but world enough, and time…)
Is this really DM remarking on Kusaal proverbs or do we finally, after many years of separate identities carefully being maintained, find out that both Davids are actually one and the same person?
All the cool kids know the “Kusaal proverb” meme these days.
It’s common knowledge by now. We’re being given periodic refreshers…
i think a comparative (and, ideally, diachronic) look at rural northern new england and southern quebec invective/pejoratives would be an interesting starting case study
Those Yorkshire dialects …. Having just watched God’s Own Country, I am a moist mess. Freak, faggot and gyppo as terms of endearment.
Sorry not sorry for neglecting “new”.
@stu
Yorkshire born, yorkshire bred, strong in’t arm thick in’t ‘ead!
Gotta love it.
In 2006 I was the external examiner for a doctoral thesis in Uppsala. (The thesis was in English: I wouldn’t have been able to cope with it if it had been in Swedish). The student was Cuban, and in the acknowledgements section there was a sentence in Spanish that included the word “coño”. If it had been in English then writing “cunt” might have been considered offensive, but “coño” is much less offensive than “cunt”, and probably passed unnoticed by the Swedish readers of the thesis. As for the French word “con” it is barely offensive at all and is used quite happily by women to mean silly — no one is shocked to hear a woman say “Que je suis conne !” to recognize that she has said something silly.
@A C-B
I suppose you have come across the ruder word.
This actress makes (or made?) short comic sketches as “Connasse”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Cottin
…but the rude part of that is -asse “woman I don’t like, for reasons explained by the rest of the word”.
I followed links from the linked paper to suggested works, and even though I don’t have access to the full work, I was struck by this one reference given in Offensive Words in Chinese Dialects:
Pang, Chi M. [彭志銘]. 2007. Xiǎo Gǒu Lǎn Cā Xié—Xiāng Gǎng Cū Kǒu Wén Huà Yán Jiū 小狗懶擦鞋—香港粗口文化研究 [Little dogs are too lazy to polish shoes: A study of Hong Kong profanity culture]. Hong Kong: 次文化堂 Sub-Culture Publishing.
Is there a reason why the laziness of little dogs in shoe care is notably offensive? Maybe some Hatter can explain it.
Wiktionary sez: “Coined by Jimmy Pang Chi-ming as the title of his book about Cantonese profanities. […] A phrase containing words with similar sounds to the five profanities in Cantonese: 屌 (diu2), 㞗 (gau1), 撚 (lan2), 𨳍 (cat6), 閪／𲈹 (hai1).”
The Five Profanes sounds like a CPC slogan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Olds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Comprehensives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Self_Patriotic_Movement
There’s also the chapter in Journey to the West where Monkey visits the Mountain of the Five Profanes (it doesn’t end well, except for the reader.)
Tapping into an old tradition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Books_and_Five_Classics
@dm
Thanks for mentioning this. I believe this word has an extra nasty feel, that the corresponding masc. connard does not quite have. But (a) this is just my feeling, (b) there can be sex asymmetries in judgments that are mirrored in language, and (c) as you say, the sexual meaning of the con element has been “bleached out” synchronically, and -asse may be generally nastier than -ard.
From Reddit, 2022:
“It’s basically a compound insult that combines a „naughty“ word with a regular one to remove some of the naughtiness. You can do this with many words for the same effect as „Hodenkobold“: „Arschgurke“ (Ass-cucumber), „Pimmelsocke“ (PeePee-sock), „Fickschnitzel“ (Fuck-Schnitzel), etc.”
AFAIK the canonical English example of [something extremely similar to] this construction is shitgibbon.
(I don’t think all the German examples match the English classification, though, unless there’s some serious syncope going on.)
карлик meant “dwarf”
…that sudden realization that карлик “dwarf” and кролик “rabbit” are ~exact etymological doublets.
but I think the point of zum “clitoris” in the first example is its inappropriateness in context, not intrinsic taboo-ness
Some modern-culture folks would probably be surprised that Kusaal has a word for “clitoris” at all.
I wonder how did the linguist researchers find out that one – it might not have been taboo, but even so I don’t imagine it was a common topic of conversation, either…
“The one hatched in the rainy season doesn’t know hawks.”
The sweet summer child.
Some modern-culture folks would probably be surprised that Kusaal has a word for “clitoris” at all
Why on earth wouldn’t it?
I wonder how did the linguist researchers find out that one
By asking?
Eliciting vocabulary for human body parts is not exactly an unusual thing in field linguistics … it’s not rocket science.
And it’s a good deal more straightforward than identifying exactly what species of plant e.g. a na’apu’a-kʋ-si’is-ku’om “queen-won’t-touch-water” is, or what siig “life force” actually means in terms of how the culture understands what makes up a human being.
And in fact, all the good dictionaries are joint productions with L1 speakers.
[Also worth mentioning that medical staff are probably the next largest group of foreigners interested in learning relevant vocabulary in local African languages after Bible translators and missionaries. It’s how I started myself …]
At the hospital in Bawku when I was there, there was a standing arrangement with a local teacher to coach newly-arrived medical staff in the basics of Kusaal.
In practice, this meant reading out scenarios he’d written for patient consultations. My favourite exchange went something like this:
Doctor: Well, my good man, what appears to be the trouble?
Patient: [Describes some symptoms.]
Doctor: Lies! Now tell me the truth!
I have to say that my subsequent experience did not really support his perhaps somewhat misanthropic view of patient habitual mendacity. It may of course be that ophthalmic patients are simply a better class of patient (just as ophthalmologists are a better class of doctor.)
The sweet summer child
Yup, that captures it pretty exactly. (Oddly, this proverb is mistranslated in Anthony Agoswin Musah’s Kusaal grammar, despite the fact that he is a L1 speaker. Weird.)
I suppose it bears out my contention that Kusaal proverbs are not in the style of everyday speech.
Awiak sɛong zi’ sinnɛ.
“Hatched-in-rainy-season doesn’t know hawks.”
However, the structure is simple enough, and specifically, the problem is that Musah hasn’t recognised that sin(nɛ) is the plural of silʋg “hawk.” (He translates it as “scarcity”; as far as I can establish, there is no such Kusaal word of this form.)
It occurs to me that it’s quite possible that in his idiolect, the word “hawk” belongs to a different noun-class pairing, so it would go silig, plural silis; supporting this, the Mooré cognate is actually sɩ̀lgá “hawk”, plural sɩlse.
(The class pairing seen in silʋg/sin is frequently pejorative for animate-reference nouns, and speakers vary in their usage in these things; usually the non-pejorative form has fallen out of use in Kusaal, but may still appear in cognates elsewhere in Western Oti-Volta.)
If so, Musah would have learnt the proverb as a unit, correctly understanding its overall sense, despite not actually knowing the last word as an independent lexical item; instead, he’d assigned a new meaning to it, based on the context, as a sort of repair strategy.
I think there are parallels to that with some English proverbs and similar fossilised turns of phrase.
There’s an Algerian proverb:
Nta mir w-ana mir, w-ǝškun yṣug ǝl-ḥmir?
You’re a prince and I’m a prince, so who’s going to drive the donkeys?
The exact same proverb, modulo phonetic details, is found in places like Egypt, so we can safely say that “mir” here means “prince” (Classical amīr). But that word is a long way away from daily life in a very republican country, and Algerians I’ve talked to generally understand it in this proverb as “mayor” (French maire).
I have never heard or read anyone using this; it seems to be variant of the much more commen Arschgeige, which looks like a strange kind of euphemism for Arschloch.
Completely unknown to me; they sound like a teenager invented them to troll a journalist or other asking for examples of the latest Jugendsprache.
@ulr
Re Pimmelsocke, I don’t know if this article is in part a joke. Maybe someone who wears lederhosen regularly can comment.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penissocke
This is a thing, BTW. Every year* Duden headquarters send someone into a school to ask for the latest youth slang; people make shit up (some of it actually funny); the “lexicographer” records it all, dutifully publishes it, and pretends to believe it’s real.
* Don’t know if still, but it was done for decades.
But that word is a long way away from daily life in a very republican country, and Algerians I’ve talked to generally understand it in this proverb as “mayor” (French maire).
What a wonderful story! I’m adding it to my repertoire of linguistic anecdotes.
I see that Musah’s grammar actually does have an example of the singular form silʋg “hawk.” One of the more Delphic lines from the formal flyting he includes as a text is given by him as
M ta’ampima dɛŋ silʊg.
“My shea leaves flew over a hawk.”
[I think this actually means “My shea-wood arrows have overtaken a hawk.” A boast.]
It occurs to me that an explanation for failure to recognise sin as “hawks” could be linguistically interesting in a different way: What is a linguistic “rule”, exactly?
The plural sin(nɛ) of silʋg(ɔ) is far from isolated. It reflects an internal sandhi rule *ld > *nd (> *nn) which, despite its odd look, is actually found in all the Oti-Volta languages in which proto-Oti-Volta non-initial *l has not become n throughout. In Kusaal, this accounts for e.g.
viug(ɔ) “owl”, plural viid(ɛ);
wabʋg(ɔ) “elephant”, plural wabid(ɛ);
but
zɔlʋg(ɔ) “fool”, plural zɔn(nɛ);
kʋ(ʋ) “kill”, imperfective kʋʋd(a);
ɔnb(ɛ) “chew”, imperfective ɔnbid(a);
but
kul(ɛ) “go home”, imperfective kun(na);
digil(ɛ) “lay down”, imperfective digin(na).
Accordingly, I give *ld > nn in my grammar as a synchronic active rule. But supposing it isn’t actually active any more? In Kusaal, loanwords are rarely borrowed as verbs; verb-stem derivation by suffixation is no longer productive; and I can’t think of any loans that have been adapted as nouns ending in -lʋg(ɔ).
There are quite a few verbs with stems ending in l, but the change to n in the imperfective could easily have been reinterpreted as a little subsystem of its own; there about half a dozen nouns in singular -lʋg(ɔ) which make plurals in -n(nɛ), but there is a good bit of synchronic unpredictability in Kusaal plural formation anyway, so they could all now be simply learnt as irregularities.
My *ld > nn “rule” is an abstraction from patterns in the data. It’s not real … there’s no reason to insist that it lives somewhere in the minds of Kusaal speakers or constrains their linguistic behaviour.
Needs a wug test …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Berko_Gleason
Wut? (zug “head”, plural zut.)
Wugus? (kʋk “chair”, plural kʋgʋs.)
Wugud? (dʋk “pot”, plural dʋgʋd.)
[Not so implausible, in fact. Most speakers pluralise lɔr “lorry, car” as lɔya, on the pattern of e.g. nɔɔr “mouth”, plural nɔya, but I also heard lɔɔm “cars”, presumably formed by analogy with Mɔɔm, the uniquely irregular plural of Mɔr “Muslim.”]
@DM: The lamestains at the New York Times fell for a similar prank when trying to elicit “Grunge slang” in the early ’90s.
Why on earth wouldn’t it?
AFAIK there is somewhat of a commonish misconception that the clitoris was only discovered ~recently and “primitive” cultures had/have no idea it existed. Certainly there seems to be some surprise that all kinds of ancient (and medieval) languages turn out to have had a word for it…
(And I suppose it would be an awkward subject of conversation even in elicitation terms, especially if the linguist in question doesn’t have one of those.)
But in retrospect I forgot about the practice of female genital mutilation (which is about as horrible as it sounds like), which would make “clitoris” important technical terminology, at the very least, in the context of which parts are occasionally getting cut off (and which would also make it relatively important vocabulary for medical staff, for the same-ish reasons).
Wikipedia gives a prevalence of 3.8% in Ghana (one of the lowest rates in Africa, actually), but “primarily <…> in Upper East Region” [where Bawku is], so it’s probably more common than that up there (and even 3% probably counts as “common” in a medical context).
I think there are parallels to that with some English proverbs and similar fossilised turns of phrase.
I think so too, but I’m failing to think of any specific examples and a (Google-assisted) LH search didn’t find any good ones.
I did, however, find this neat Russian case.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29480
Wikipedia gives a prevalence of 3.8% in Ghana (one of the lowest rates in Africa, actually), but “primarily in Upper East Region” [where Bawku is], so it’s probably more common than that up there (and even 3% probably counts as “common” in a medical context)
It’s illegal in Ghana, though sadly it’s illegal in a lot of places where it remains common.
However, the Kusaasi have never practiced it; in fact, they are unusual for the area in having no age-related rite-of-passage ceremonies at all, for either sex. They seem never to have had any, rather than to have abandoned them. (The Kusaasi did use to file their teeth; but then, who doesn’t?)
The Moba have it (I knew a Togolese Moba activist whose chief aim in her life was to see it eradicated), and it was traditional among the Mamprussi, apparently as a Muslim importation. (The Hadith support for the practice is, I gather, extremely weak, and certainly it is by no means generally attributable in Africa to Muslim influence. The Mossi have it, and at least until recently they were one of the most northerly groups in the savanna to remain largely “pagan.” It’s probably more something that trickled down from the Mossi-Dagomba chiefly elite.) Dunno about the Bisa.
One of my Mamprussi colleagues was once recounting a visit to his village during which he’d taken time out to threaten the (female) local practioner with legal consequences. (It worked.)
I think there are parallels to that with some English proverbs and similar fossilised turns of phrase.
Some of which are called eggcorns. Being to the manor born gives us free reign to do that, and our non-phonetic spelling means the misinterpretations can show up in writing. (Please remember that I have the copywrite on this answer.)
J N Adams’ indispensible The Latin Sexual Vocabulary confirms (if confirmation were needed) regarding the Roman clitoris, that the “the function of the part was well understood, and it is often mentioned in connection with sexual acts.”
However, the actual word landica “clitoris” was so obscene that Cicero alludes to it only in a sort of pun: Hanc culpam maiorem an illam dicam?
Adams also mentions that the word survived in Old French (landie.)
It is surely evident that the word must be a loan from Kusaal lannig(a) “squirrel.” It was no doubt necessary for Europeans to seek enlightenment in Africa regarding these mysteries. (The word itself would have been transmitted via Etruscan.)
And in Romanian (lindic). Wiktionary thinks it’s “Probably for *glandīca, from glāns (‘acorn’) + -īcus.”
Email just now from academia.edu:
I think I detect the work of the same “AI” that recently emailed me with the exciting news of $500,000 of research funding relevant to my interest in proto-Oti-Volta …
de Vaan doesn’t list the word at all; either he overlooked it (unlikely), or he thinks it is not “likely to have been inherited from Proto-Indo-European.” Ernout/Meillet list the word, but have no etymology. If you go back about a century, the second edition of Walde’s etymological dictionary quotes an article by a certain Fay in Cl. Quarterly I, 13ff who apparently is responsible for the derivation from *glandica; Walde has some doubts, but at the time (a century ago) he saw it as the only halfway viable hypothesis. Does anybody know what the 3rd edition (Walde/Hofmann) says?
The pun isn’t Cicero’s; he only reports a disertus consularis using these words in the Senate and C’s comment is: Potuit obscenius?.
Kusaal zʋm, Swahili (ki)simi. Close enough for Mass Comparison work!
Unfortunately, zʋm is not reconstructable to proto-Oti-Volta, or even proto-Western Oti-Volta, as far as I can see. The dictionaries actually are a little unforthcoming, but what I can find is not very promising from a comparative standpoint.
Mampruli has zunguri, Dagbani zuŋguli, where the first element looks cognate with the Kusaal word, and I suppose that the second might be “kola nut”, or perhaps “ridge” (both = Kusaal gʋʋr.)
But Mooré has zìgrí. The compound zig-wãada “clitoris-cutter” names a specifically female role, as among the Mamprussi. The dictionary entry for the word cites a somewhat grim proverb:
Zig-wãad biig kiida ne zigri.
“L’enfant de l’exciseuse meurt avec le clitoris.”
(Proverbe: il s’agit de quelqu’un qui produit des biens ou des services et qui n’en profite pas. Comme on le dit le cordonnier est toujours mal chaussé.)
Nawdm kóbííŕ looks like a diminutive of kwɛ́ɛ́-b́ “vagina.”
The Gulimancema dictionary has jénbíli, a similar formation from jén-bu “sexe de la femme.” Mbelime yóbiìdè looks like yet another similar derivation, but from yóó-dè “tail”, which is cognate with Kusaal zʋʋr. The -bi- element in all these might in fact be “seed” rather than “little.”
The -bi- element in all these might in fact be “seed” rather than “little.”
Dyula, I see, has biyɛkisɛ, which is a transparent compound “vagina-seed.” So yeah. Areal idiom.
Fulfulde lanngal, plural lannge. OK, so that’s the source of the Latin word …
It’s actually not phonologically impossible that Gulimancema jénbu “female sexual organs” is cognate with Kusaal zʋm “clitoris” now I’ve had a chance to think about it. A bit of semantic drift …
(Unfortunately I don’t know the tone of the Kusaal word. It should be mid, changing to low in compounds, if the words really are cognate.)
Toende Kusaal has zʋmkãbɩt, and Niggli marks the first element as low tone: so far, so good. And Kusaal words with two stem morae which have low tone as the first element in compounds are significantly more likely to carry mid tone than low tone in their free forms.
No idea about -kãbɩt. It seems to mean “roast flour used as baby feed”, which is not very … erotic. YMMV …
I may have been too timid in saying that “clitoris” was not reconstructable to proto-Oti-Volta. Two possible candidates, no less …
Waama has dikire “clitoris” (dikima “vagina.”)
That could be cognate with Mooré zìgrí; in fact, the only difficulty is the initial consonant.
There are very few good comparative series for POV *j, but there’s Waama duure “tail” beside Mooré zʋ́ʋre … (and Eastern Oti-Volta has a few other spontaneous cases of initial d for proto-Oti-Volta *j, e.g. Mbelime díɛ̀mɛ̀ “potash”, Mooré zẽem.)
The other option:
Proto-Oti-Volta *jɪ́m-fʊ́ “female genitalia” would do fine as the perfectly regular ancestor of Gulimancema jénbu; rounding of vowels before labials is very common as a sporadic thing in Oti-Volta, and that’s all that’s needed to produce the Kusaal stem zʋm- regularly. The Kusaal word belongs to a different “gender”/noun-class pair, but it’s actually the one that most body-parts belong to, and the *-fʊ class has lost many other original members to other classes historically in Western Oti-Volta.
In fact, given that the POV *-fʊ class was strongly associated semantically with seeds and other small round things, it would be quite plausible to suppose that POV *jɪ́m-fʊ́ actually was specifically “clitoris” and that Gulimancema has preserved the form but lost the precise meaning, whereas Kusaal has kept the original meaning but changed the class membership to the one more usual for body parts.
One must, of course, reckon with the possibility that such words are Wanderwörter, transmitted from man to man across linguistic boundaries, along with the associated secret teachings.
No idea about -kãbɩt. It seems to mean “roast flour used as baby feed”, which is not very … erotic. YMMV …
Might be a riff on the “grain / seed” motive? Or maybe an allusion to the ancient practice of “eating pussy”?
Alas, we just don’t know.
For Hombori, Heath records dòf‑[í:z‑ò] “[cpd n, lit. “vagina-child”] clitoris”. So definitely areal.
For Zarma, Bernard and White-Kaba give the somewhat more language-specific metaphor dàbíinà-ízè “date-child”.
“vagina-child”
Beside zìgrí, Mooré also has zìg-bíla; the -bíla part is sometimes (like Kusaal bil) glossed “little”, but in fact never seems to mean simply “small in size”; it’s used for younger family members, the young of animals (e.g. nag-bila “calf”) and parts of wholes (e.g. nug-bila “finger.”)
Kusaal bil has the same semantic range, but I see that unlike the Kusaal word, Mooré bila can appear as a free noun “pion, pièce de jeu, unité, graine, fruit, pépin”; so there is no actual formal distinction made between the (not-exactly) “diminutive” and “seed, grain” senses.
Mooré -bíla is transparently from the same root as -bíiga “child”, which is straightforwardly reconstructable to proto-Volta-Congo, if not even further back. [The -la suffix is from a “diminutive” class which is otherwise reduced to a few relics in Western Oti-Volta.]
I hadn’t quite appreciated how deeply ingrained the “child/seed” semantic overlap is in Oti-Volta (though obviously it’s a natural one.)
I may also need to revise my classification of Kusaal bil as an “adjective” in my grammar; at least in origin, it’s evidently a noun.
Kusaal adjectives can’t stand alone, except for a subset that can head predicative phrases (a secondary development following the loss of their corresponding cognate stative verbs.)
But it doesn’t follow that any left-bound nominal is therefore an adjective. Daan “owner of …” is left-bound, but not an adjective, for example (tieŋ daan “bearded person.”)
And, on reflection, a word like nu’ubil “finger” is more naturally analysed as head-final “hand segment” than head-initial “minor hand.” And mabil “mother’s younger sister” makes a lot more sense as “maternal junior” than “minor mother.”
And bil is invariant for “gender”, even in Farefare, where (limited) adjective agreement with head nouns still happens, and in Nõotre, where class-based grammatical gender is still fully functional (núbìlá “finger.”)
So what’s the deal with Farefare? “Farefare or Frafra, […] is a Niger–Congo language spoken by the Frafra people of northern Ghana” — where’s the stress on Farefare, and how is Frafra an alternative? The vowels count for nothing at all?
OK: looked at some texts: bil does just mean “little” sometimes.
bʋmbɛda nɛ bʋmbibis “big things and little things”
Though many examples involve some semantic shift: in other words, they work like “blackbird” rather than “black bird.”
pu’abil “concubine” (from “wife”)
sibitibil “clinic” (from “hospital”)
Even so, I think I have to admit that although bil probably originated as a noun, and as head in the compounds that include it, it can now function as an adjective compounded with a preceding noun head.
So what’s the deal with Farefare?
Stress on the first syllable: /’farɛfarɛ/.
In Farefare itself, (ya) fárá fárá is an informal greeting “Hi, hello.” “Frafra” is of the same origin as “Farefare”, but more mangled by outsiders; it seems to have come into use as an exonym in local English in the earlier part of the 20th century.
At least when I lived in the area, “Frafra” was the usual exonym in English, but apparently the people themselves prefer “Farefare.” As a language name, this also has the accidental benefit of fitting the Western Oti-Volta pattern of glottonyms taking the class suffixes -re or -le.
There’s no single traditional term in the language itself for the whole language, only for the various dialects. The Bolgatanga dialect is Gure(n)nɛ, i.e. the language of the Gure(n)si, and the main Burkina Faso dialect is Ninkãrɛ, the language of the Ninkãrsɩ. There are others.
The waters are muddied still further by the fact the “Farefare”/”Frafra” is used in local English as an umbrella term for some politically and culturally linked groups that don’t actually speak Farefare-the-language, like the Tallensi and Nabdema, whose languages are actually more closely related to Kusaal (Nabit in particular is extremely similar to Toende Kusaal, and would probably be called a Kusaal dialect if the Nabdema self-identified as Kusaasi.) Standard reference works usually misclassify these languages as “Farefare.”
In case that wasn’t confusing enough, various neighbouring groups speaking “Grusi” languages also form part of the Bolgatanga-based traditional chieftaincy, and the entire Gur branch these languages belong to is called “Gurunsi” (or Grũsi) – after the endonym Gure(n)si used by the Bolgatanga Farefare …
The name “Gur” for the entire Oti-Volta-Grusi-Koromfe-and-trimmings language group (which the French call voltaïque) was apparently coined by Koelle on the basis of Gurenɛ and Gulimancema “Gurmanche.”
So ‘sibiti’ is hospital? Obviously a borrowing from Welsh…
Of course. Wales has long led the world in healthcare.
In this case, the loan may perhaps have been mediated though the Hausa asibiti.
Just encountered, in the most recent of Max Gladstone’s “Craft” sequence of novels: