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This article examines how Arabic handled societal taboos in the medieval Islamic world and the ways by which language users applied censorship that led to the creation of euphemisms. Special attention is given to sources from the eastern part of the Islamic world dating to the fourth/tenth and the fifth/eleventh centuries, and to the taboo topics and types of euphemisms they disclose. The complex relationship between the concept of euphemism and kinäya, the polysemous Arabic term that renders it, is examined. As a whole, the evidence demonstrates an overwhelming Arabic preference for figurative speech over change of form as the essential generation mechanism of euphemisms. Finally, light is shed on the ways in which discerning medieval literary critics anticipated significant modem sociolinguistic observations: the relations between euphemism, orthophemism, and dysphemism, in addition to the incessant process of euphemism degradation.
I. INTRODUCTION
A universal human phenomenon, taboos are well attested in past and present societies. A taboo is defined by the linguists Keith Allan and Kate Burridge as "a proscription of behaviour for a specifiable community of one or more persons, at a specifiable time, in specifiable contexts." Despite their ubiquity, "there is no such thing as an absolute taboo that holds for all worlds, times and contexts."1 People censor their language in order to avoid taboo words, which are believed to be either harmful or uncomfortable to the speaker or hearers. Tabooed words are commonly related to sex, bodily functions and effluvia, sickness, death, food, and the sacred. Such words are often expressed in language indirectly by means of a euphemism, "sweet talking,"2 an elaborate and inclusive definition of which is "an alternative to a dispreferred expression, in order to avoid possible loss of face: either one's own face or, through giving offense, that of the audience, or of some third party."3
My main goal in this article is to show how Arabic reflected societal taboos in the medieval Islamic world, and the ways by which Arabic speakers applied censorship that led to the creation of euphemisms. The Arabic term for euphemism used in the medieval sources is kinäya.4 However, it should be stated at the outset that euphemism-&möya is not a one-to-one relationship; before treating its euphemistic sense, the polysemy of kinäya will...