Secret Language by Barry J. Blake

Author:Barry J. Blake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

In-Laws

In many parts of the world there are strict rules governing conduct towards in-laws.14 They may involve avoidance of any contact or direct communication; the use of a special vocabulary in speaking to an in-law or in the presence of an in-law; or not mentioning the name of an in-law. The purpose of such codes may be to minimize any conflict between loyalty to relations by marriage and loyalty to kin, but they are often treated as having been laid down by venerated ancestors or supernatural beings, and they are not treated lightly. Among the Dusun of Borneo it is considered bad luck to utter the name of a mother-in-law or father-in-law (Williams 1963b: 173, riddle 170), and Australian Aborigines are affected by a deep sense of shame or disgust if there is even an accidental transgression of a taboo relating to in-laws. There is a report of a man becoming very distressed because his mother-in-law’s shadow had fallen on him (Fison in Fison and Howitt 1880: 103). The shadow is often regarded as part of a person akin to a body part and treated like a body part grammatically.15

Among speakers of Kambaata, an East Cushitic language spoken in Ethiopia, women traditionally practised a form of respect towards their mother-in-law, father-in-law, and in some cases the parents of the father-in-law. This respect behaviour was called ballishsháta and it involved some avoidance of social contact, mainly with the fatherin-law, and avoiding the names of the parents-in-law and any word beginning with the same syllable as their names (Treis 2005). On her wedding day the bride was given a laxative to void her stomach and bowels, and was then taught a small vocabulary of ballishsháta words, receiving a sip of drink or a morsel of food with each word learnt. She was also taught how to find substitute words to avoid using words with the tabooed initial syllables. These words could be found using the following principles. In each example the everyday word is given first and the ballishsháta word to the right.

(a) a word that is semantically similar

afóo mouth yaburú lips

(b) derivation, e.g. using -aanchú, which is like the -er in

English forming agent nouns

harruuchchú donkey iyy-aanchú one who carries

(c) a periphrasis

hizóo brother ama’íbeetú son of my mother

(d) using an antonym

usur- tie gaffar- untie

uurr stand up afuu’ll sit down

As a last resort a woman can use the root soomm-, which means ‘unspeakable’. Some women applied the restrictions to function words, though others applied them to lexical words only.

Among the Southern Bantu peoples such as the Zulu and Xhosa married women traditionally had to practise hlonipa, avoidance behaviour in relation to male in-laws, especially the father-in-law, and sometimes to the mother-in-law. With respect to language it involved avoiding the in-law’s name, and what is remarkable, avoiding any syllable contained in the name (Herbert 1990a, b). For instance, a certain Xhosa woman with senior male in-laws called Dike, Ntlokwana, and Saki and a mother-in-law called Nina could not utter the syllables di, ke, ntlo, kwa, na, sa, ki, ni, and na.

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