Taboo replacements

[Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Nicholas Widdows wrote:

> Or are they somehow morphologically marked? I know respect/avoidance
> language is widely used in the bear-hunting North (see Joseph Campbell on
> the Ainu), but might we not expect new terms like "well-intentioned one" or
> "your excellency" rather than the merely prosaic "it's big and it's brown
> and it likes a jar of hunny"?

When one looks at lexical replacement for 'bear' in North America for
taboo/respect reasons, one finds the fairly pedestrian replacements mentioned
above or borrowed words, not the "your mighty greatness" variety.  So in
Comanche, for example, one finds three different roots for 'bear' including
older patua (something like "big boy", later shortened to tua and found in
tutua 'bear cub'), wasa"pe (" is a Numic morphophonemic marker, in Comanche it
keeps the p from being lenited to [v]) (borrowed from Osage wasape), and
archaicly wyyta (y is barred i) (the form inherited from Proto-Central Numic
and gone in modern Comanche).  In fact, when comparing documentary Comanche
from 1786 until the present, one finds the three forms for bear in order (wyyta
on the way out, patua common; patua on the way out, wasape coming in, wyyta
gone; wasape common, patua shortened to tua and almost gone).  That's not much
of a life span for a non-taboo word.  In Colorado River Numic (the language
that comprises the Chemehuevi, Southern Paiute, and Ute dialects), we find
kwi(j)akanty (j is y and y is barred i) (derived from kwija 'burn', "burned
one" or "smoke-colored one").  In Mono and Panamint (one borrowed from the
other), we have pahapittsi (derived from pahapi 'swim', "swimmer" or "one who
lays in water", with -ttsi affectionate diminutive). All of these groups have a
taboo respect for bear, but none of the lexical replacements for older forms
shows any particularly high-brow form for the new word.  In fact, look at the
ways that Americans replace the name of "God" in casual speech--"the man
upstairs", for example.  I would say that a taboo replacement is probably MORE
likely to be a pedestrian form than something special.  After all, one needs a
word to use in casual speech without the respect inherent in the taboo form.

John McLaughlin
Utah State University