Abstrakt
Rude words and their study were long put aside but in the past decades they get more and more attention, despite the fact that Reinhold Aman - by many called the founder of maledictology - designates in the notes to his Bayrisches-Österreichisches Schimpfwörterbuch the science of rude words as "vernachlässigtes Wissenschaftsfeld". Rude words, curses and insults belong to the basic lexicon since early literary sources.
They had to be and still are a vivid component of everyday speech of the majority of the population. They are somehow outstanding in the lexicon of every dead or living language and are mostly ascribed to the lower style and lower social class.
We encounter them in the oldest attested languages in different types of texts, especially in the comedy. It is no wonder that there has been written relatively a lot of smaller studies but also many elaborated dictionaries on this topic (see references below).
Nevertheless, there is still missing a comprehensive study which would offer a brighter and coherent picture from a diachronic point of view comparing and analysing the usage of vulgarisms. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to present a more detailed and systematic examination of lexemes or whole phrases respectively in selected dead and spoken languages of Indo-European language family (primarily in Indo-Iranian, Greek, Latin and Germanic languages).
The paper will introduce the audience into different aspects of this problematics. After brief opening introduction to the topic and the history of maledictology, there will be discussed single cases of insults, rude words and curses.
All these parts of speech will be analysed from the etymological point of view, their pragmatics, semantics, semantic fields, semantic shift and various functions (cf. Elšík 2009) of vulgarisms and related phenomena will be discussed.
A further aim is to elucidate the origin of more obscure phrases and set forth some typological criteria of their distribution and categorization (e. g. sexual and faecal distinction or so-called pornolalic and coprolalic languages).