Some aspects of snake euphemisms in Lithuanian : names based on appearance, habitat, and behaviour

ENOne of the aspects of linguistic worldview are taboos and the ways they make their way into daily usage. In one kind of taboo, a word is endowed with a magical function, which leads to the emergence of euphemisms. These euphemisms are used to replace dangerous words that can call forth disasters or spirits, and enable the speaker to interact with others without the fear of breaking the taboo. The goal of this article is to analyse the euphemisms for the snake in the Lithuanian language. The analysis is based on a semantic classification of euphemisms. The data come from various dictionaries and texts of folklore. Euphemism for the snake constitute the largest group of animal euphemisms in Lithuanian and only a selected sample of them are addressed here. The ancient cult of the snake in Lithuania was abolished with the advent of Christianity and then a negative attitude to snakes was imposed. A possible classification of snake euphemisms would thus be to distinguish those that originated before Christianity and those that did after it had been introduced. [From the publication]