[Lingtyp] Mapping /l/ to 'tongue'

[JOO Ian]

Dear typologists,

I have noticed two interesting parallel phenomena:

1. Latin dingua 'tongue' replaced by lingua, for unknown reason;
2. Middle Chinese zyet 舌 'tongue' replaced by lei 脷 in Cantonese (and other southern Sinitic lects), which is apparently for euphemistic reason - Cantonese sit3 舌 sounds similar to sik6 蝕 ’to corrode’ - but still unclear why it had to be lei among all other sounds.

There seems to be diachronic pressure to map /l/ into ’tongue’. This is in line with the fact several typological studies confirming that /l/ is abnormally common in words for ’tongue’ in world’s languages (Blast et al. 2016, Joo 2020, Erben Johansson et al. 2020).

I would thus like to ask (historical) typologists whether you are aware of similar phenomena where the common term for ’tongue’ has unexpectedly acquired /l/, either via irregular sound change (like Latin) or lexical replacement (like Cantonese).

From Otaru,
Ian

References

Blasi, Damián E et al. “Sound-meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 113,39 (2016): 10818-23. doi:10.1073/pnas.1605782113

Joo, Ian. "Phonosemantic biases found in Leipzig-Jakarta lists of 66 languages" Linguistic Typology, vol. 24, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1-12. doi:10.1515/lingty-2019-0030

Erben Johansson et al. "The typology of sound symbolism: Defining macro-concepts via their semantic and phonetic features" Linguistic Typology, vol. 24, no. 2, 2020, pp. 253-310. doi:10.1515/lingty-2020-2034

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朱　易安
JOO, IAN
准教授
Associate Professor
小樽商科大学
Otaru University of Commerce
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🌐 ianjoo.github.io
📞 +81 (0)134-27-5422
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