Search results for "euphemisms"

Names of Snakes in Latvian Texts of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

2020

Names of Snakes in Latvian Texts of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries This article analyses the naming of snakes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latvian texts which are taken from the Corpus of Early Written Latvian Texts, containing the first Latvian dictionaries, religious texts, and some secular texts. The objective of the paper is to try to determine how precisely the translators of religious texts rendered names of snakes, and to ascertain whether any semantic changes have taken place, or whether religious texts show specific use. The study also aims to find out if taboo of dangerous animals, snakes in particular, and related euphemisation is reflected in early Latvian text…