We Do Not Speak of Such Things

Reading Kate Burridge’s Weeds in the Garden of Words, a collection of oddities in the English language. Some interesting stuff on irregularities, pronunciation shifts, and changing attitudes regarding ‘unacceptable’ slang and sentence constructions.

One bit I found especially interesting concerns taboo words, and resulting pronunciation shifts. The example she offers is ‘coney’, the original English word for rabbit. It was originally pronounced to rhyme with ‘money’. It dropped out of use in the nineteenth century due to a perceived similarity to ‘cunt’ – ‘rabbit’ originally referred only to the young of the animal, not the adults. Before rabbit took its place, there were efforts to alter coney to allow it to remain acceptable, by changing the pronunciation to rhyme with ‘phoney’. The word ‘bunny’ may also have been originally a euphemism from the suddenly unacceptable ‘coney’.

This is interesting, because it’s an example of an intentional pronunciation shift, rather than the usual more gradual and undirected changes.

What was even more interesting, though, was that Burridge noted that this sort of euphemistic alteration of words that sound similar to taboo words is common in most languages, and offered the example of the Austronesian languages, specifically those of the Solomon Islands. Many cultures in this area have a strong taboo against using the name of the deceased. Since names are often derived from common vocabulary words, when a person dies, a great many words are suddenly similar to a taboo word. Apparently, this results in the languages of the Solomon Islands having an unusually high turnover of vocabulary and pronunciation, with new euphemistic pronunciations coming into use regularly to replace words rendered semi-taboo by a recent death.