The Riječki filološki dani Symposium

The Riječki filološki dani Symposium has been held in Rijeka (Croatia) since 1994. This year, the 14th meeting in April 2025, Tjaša Jakop was also present. In the Transgression in Philology section, she presented a paper entitled Obravnava izbranih tabuiziranih pomenov v slovenskem jezikoslovju (Overview of selected taboo meanings in Slovenian linguistics), together with a colleague Agata Šega (The Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana). Jakop showed (also on linguistic maps) Slovenian words for some of the most common taboo meanings: “spolno občevati” (‘to have sex’), “penis”, “vulva/vagina” and “zadnjica” (‘buttock’). We were particularly interested in the scope and method of linguistic treatment of taboo meanings, as even academic linguistics sometimes tends to avoid them, while the material from practise shows an extraordinary wealth of terminology. For example, over forty names are known for the male genitalia alone.

In the first part of the article, we show how – and whether at all – Slovenian linguistics has dealt with lexemes from this semantic area so far and to what extent they are available in dictionaries (with a focus on etymological and dialectal dictionaries). In the second part, we present the vocabulary found for the above-mentioned meanings in the materials for the Slovenian Linguistic Atlas (SLA), as well as the vocabulary subsequently collected during the dialect field research and the dialect material published in 1909 by the ethnographer, linguist, polyglot, translator and critic Ivan Koštiál, whose particular passion was collecting linguistic and folkloristic material from the field of sexual life of different nations. Finally, we analyse the role that different types of euphemistic innovations in the language, such as metaphorical and metonymic procedures, metathesis, borrowings from foreign languages, etc., have played in the emergence of these names.