Re: English-esque Vocabulary Range

Emaelivpar Christophe Grandsire:
>"Nippon" is also an offensive word for Japanese in French. And that doesn't
>stop us to use "Nippo-" without offensive meaning :))) .
But then there's an opposite example, where (uninformed) people take
offense to the word "niggard" because of its similarity to "nigger".  Isn't
there a term for this, when one word becomes taboo because of its
phonological similarity to a true taboo word?  I think I read about it in
Peter Trudgill's "Sociolinguistics" book.  There were even cross-linguistic
examples, eg an Amerindian word became taboo because it sounded like the
English f-word.


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AA