Saturday, June 04, 2011
Terms of Endearment
Friederike Braun, Terms of Address: Problems of Patterns and Usage in Various Languages and Cultures (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988), p. 254:
Newer› ‹Older
In the category of terms of endearment, words with the most diverse meanings can occur, almost without semantic restrictions: they may sound odd when taken literally. English honey, German dialect Bankert 'bastard' and Stinker(chen) 'stinking one' (both used to children, informant's communication), Arabic mucláagi 'my lung', bálaħi 'my dates' (El-Anani 1971:108), Hungarian cica 'cat' or gyönggyvirágom 'my lily of the valley' (Halász 1957:267, 805), Icelandic rassgat 'anus' (Schubert 1984c:56), Kazakh šyraġym 'my light/lamp' (Schubert 1986a:128) and so on.According to Richard Cleasby, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, rev. Gudbrand Vigfusson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1874), p. 483, rass = 'anus' and rassgat = 'fissura ani'.
