Piotr:
>Do I need to assure you I'm not Victorian (or I wouldn't have alluded >to
>the word at all)? We have discussed words such as "cunnus" on this >list
>before.
Oh no, I didn't mean to accuse you of Victorianism, Piotr. You are clearly
the king of trash talk. <:) I was just lashing out at humanity in general
which seems to always tend towards sexual shame...
Perhaps those feelings were partly provoked by a recent news event about the
very long Canadian court case involving "Little Sisters" in Vancouver, a gay
& lesbian bookstore. They were being denied the right to import literature
because it was deemed too "obscene" for Canadian consumption. Obviously the
Canadian censors don't have internet access. The bookstore finally won the
case, but in general, I find that "sex" is still a taboo word here even
though it's on TV every day and in movies. I was brought up as a Jehovah's
Witness for god's sakes (that is, before I turned bad), and even _I_ find
that society is wound up tighter than an elizabethan corset! Maybe it's just
a "Canada" thing. I wouldn't pretend to know the European state of affairs.
At any rate, I can't say that these reconstructed sexual terms are leaping
out at me at the library (whether that be public or university). I find
nothing racier than *kaka-, *pesd- and *perd- repeated ad nauseum.
Absolutely no in-depth stuff on IE sexuality. Now that I'm aware of /oipho:/
and /yabhati/, I might be able to chance at something.
>The only problem with *jebH- is that it's restricted to three >branches, of
>which one (Greek oipho:) shows a slightly irregular >reflex. It seems to be
>an Eastern IE regional term. Before anybody >asks, Latic futuere and
>English fuck/German ficken are false friends.
Interesting. I wonder if it could have anything to do with *gwi:bh- that the
American Heritage site lists. I know that the phonetics are not perfect at
all but then, these sorts of terms are often corrupted over time like the
word "cunt" and Chaucerian "queynte" or "arse" versus "ass".
Interestingly, according to the site, *gwi:bh- is only seen in Tocharian and
Germanic. This distribution seems to complement the "eastern" *yebh-. I
wonder if the following might have occured:
**gwy�xbho: "fuck" (verb)
-> corrupted *xWy�bho: (oipho:, y�bhati)
*gw�xbhos "pudenda" (noun)
(TochA kip; TochB kwi:pe; Germanic *wibam "woman")
>Hope your detective work with the Sanskrit dictionary did you a lot >of
>good.
Yes, one might say that it uncovered a lot and relieved my curiosity :) Ah,
to die, to sleep...
- gLeN
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