hich is linked
on to the religious and ritual feeling which we have already
found to be a factor of modesty, and which, even when applied to
language, appears to have an almost or quite instinctive basis,
for it is found among the most primitive savages, who very
frequently regard a name as too sacred or dangerous to utter.
Among the tribes of Central Australia, in addition to his
ordinary name, each individual has his sacred or secret name,
only known to the older and fully initiated members of his own
totemic group; among the Warramunga, it is not permitted to women
to utter even a man's ordinary name, though she knows it.
(Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p.
581.) In the mysterious region of sex, this feeling easily takes
root. In many parts of the world, men use among themselves, and
women use among themselves, words and even languages which they
may not use without impropriety in speaking to persons of the
opposite sex, and it has been shown that exogamy, or the fact
that the wife belongs to a different tribe, will not always
account for this phenomenon. (Crawley, _The Mystic Rose_, p. 46.)
A special vocabulary for the generative organs and functions is
very widespread. Thus, in northwest Central Queensland, there is
both a decent and an indecent vocabulary for the sexual parts; in
Mitakoodi language, for instance, _me-ne_ may be used for the
vulva in the best aboriginal society, but _koon-ja_ and _pukkil_,
which are names for the same parts, are the most blackguardly
words known to the natives. (W. Roth, _Ethnological Studies Among
the Queensland Aborigines_, p. 184.) Among the Malays, _puki_ is
also a name for the vulva which it is very indecent to utter, and
it is only used in public by people under the influence of an
obsessive nervous disorder. (W. Gilman Ellis, "Latah," _Journal
of Mental Science_, Jan., 1897.) The Swahili women of Africa have
a private metaphorical language of their own, referring to sexual
matters (Zache, _Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie_, 1899, Heft 2-3, pp.
70 et seq.), and in Samoa, again, young girls have a euphemistic
name for the penis, _aualuma_, which is not that in common use
(_Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie_, 1899, Heft 1, p. 31); exactly the
same thing is found in Europe, to-day, and is sometimes more
marked among