Abstract
Rude words and their study were long put aside, but in the past decades they have got more and more attention, despite the fact that in the notes to his Bayrisches-Österreichisches Schimpfwörterbuch Reinhold Aman - by many called the founder of maledictology - designates the investigation into rude words as "vernachlässigtes Wissenschaftsfeld". Rude words, curses and insults are attested as part of the basic lexicon since early literary sources.
Evidently they were and still are a vivid component of everyday speech of the majority of the population. They are somehow outstanding in the lexicon of any dead or living language as being mostly ascribed to the lower style and lower social classes.
We encounter them already in the oldest attested languages in different types of texts, especially in the comedy. It is no wonder that on this topic there have been written not only a lot of smaller studies, but also many elaborated dictionaries (see references below).
Nevertheless, there is still missing a comprehensive study that 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 the Indo-European language family (primarily Vedic, Old Greek, Latin, Germanic and Romani).
The paper will familiarize the audience with various aspects of this issue. After a brief introduction to the topic and the history of maledictology, there will be discussed single cases of insults, rude words and curses.
All the respective parts of speech will be analysed from the etymological point of view, considering their pragmatics, semantics, semantic fields, and semantic shift. There will be also a discussion of the various functions of vulgarisms and related phenomena (cf.
Elšík 2009). A further aim is to elucidate the origin of more obscure phrases and to set forth some typological criteria of their distribution and categorization (e.g. the sexual and fecal distinction or so-called pornolalic and coprolalic speech).