A Tabu Word in the Peking Dialect

much tougher life than the harmless homonym.'l This phenomenon is observable in many languages, including English and Chinese. Chinese is a more fruitful field than English in this respect because in English sets of homonyms are not especially frequent, and when they occur they seldom have more than two members each. But in Chinese languages, such as the Peking dialect2 (Pk.), the situation is different: sets of homonyms are frequent, often containing over ten members commonly occurring in ordinary speech. This is because there are not many possible different syllables in the language, and because there is a preponderance of monosyllabic morphemes and words. The result is that if a word is tabued, it is likely to be monosyllabic and homonymous with other words and morphemes at the time the tabu takes effect. This paper describes one instance of tabu in Pk., suggests some mechanisms that might be involved, offers a reconstruction for an earlier form of the tabued word, and tentatively dates some stages in the history of the tabu.