rob@ptsfa.UUCP (Rob Bernardo) (10/27/84)
Way back when I was a freshman in college taking my first linguistics class,
we were taught (told?) that obscene words in a language tend to be extremely
stable and follow the normal sound changes in the evolution of a language
rather than exhibit idiosyncratic changes.
Two examples I remember:
1. The Latin word for 'with' was 'cum', which has evolved into
Modern Spanish and Italian 'con'. At some point in the history
of French, due to the sound changes in that language, the word
for 'with' came to sound very much like the word for 'cunt',
which in Latin was 'cunnus'. It was the very basic word for 'with'
that changed, and so in Modern French the word for 'with'
is 'avec', from Latin 'ab hoc'.
2. Similarly, the usual word for rabbit in older English was 'cony',
currently preserved in the place name 'Coney Island'. This word
was to much like the ancestor of 'cunt' to be comfortably used,
and so the word we use today is 'rabbit'.
As for 'fuck', all the etymologies I have seen from linguists show a rather
usual history. It's Middle English ancestor was 'fucken' meaning 'to strike,
move quickly, penetrate', and it ultimately comes from the Proto-Indoeuropean
root 'peig' via very usual sound changes (e.g. Grimm's law).
--
Rob Bernardo, Pacific Bell, San Francisco, California
{ihnp4,ucbvax,cbosgd,decwrl,amd70,fortune,zehntel}!dual!ptsfa!pbauae!rob