Re: CHAT: False friends - echos from the mother tounge

On Wed, 2003-07-09 at 23:34, Steven Williams wrote:
> Harald Stoiber hat geschrieben:
>
> > What would you do in the following case? Let us say,
> > you have a root "sat" and an inflectional
> > ending "an"... would you avoid the remaining
> > "satan"? Just a question. Are you trying to avoid
> > inclusion of negative or unpleasant terms of your
> > mother tounge into your conlang?
>
> Well, German has a whole slew of words that sound like
> English curse words. 'Fach' [fax] and 'Damm' [dam] are
> the only ones I can think of right off hand, but you
> get the idea.
Hell, even English has 'dam' which is a homophone for 'damn'. OTOH, ass
was apparently replaced by donkey because some dialects simply lost the
/r/ in /rs/ (in 'arse'), rather than turning it into something else.

--
Tristan.