Quote:
Originally Posted by FlorenceArt
I think it's simply due to the fact that anything connected with reproduction was considered dirty, and could not be mentioned directly. My mother told me that when she was young, she was once taken to visit a friend of her mother. She was told this lady had broken her leg (presumably she was at the hospital or in bed at home), but when the visitors arrived there just happened to be a newborn baby.
Jane Austen calls childbirth "confinement".
When I was a teenager myself, I remember one of my classmates asking me with a silly girly giggle whether I was "indisposed" (incommodée). I looked at her stupidly and said "No, I'm fine". In fact she wanted to know whether I had started having my periods.  |
Bodily functions are still often "taboo", and the period is certainly among them. But I'd never think of childbirth that way! Now that you mention it though, there was one acquaintance (of an acquaintance),who took a lot of time off work because his wife was having some "health problems", only to later reveal that she was actually just simply pregnant. That was one or two years ago too, not in the previous century... Embarrassing indeed!
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Extract from Wiki:
Now we know why so few people learn Finnish  . |
Fifteen!
That's the joy of languages like japanese, the problems you encounter when learning their grammar are so refreshingly different. Not that english has any cases to speak of, either, now that I think about it. (well, traces like I-me, but they don't really count)