Linguistic Similarities?

[debka_notion]

In the course of looking for definitions of love for my latest website project (Sparked by something Efi wrote, go figure), I was just reading some random stuff online, which was talking about how one older Greek word for "to kiss" (I originally wrote "kissing", but then I'd have to match it with the same sort of verbal noun later on, and "impregnating" just sounds Odd.) fell out of use because it sounded too much like the verb "to impregnate". I seem to remember a similar issue in French. Oh you linguists out there- know you if this is a common problem? (Either having those words sound alike, or having the slang for one mean the other) Any ideas if this might have something to do with actual etymology, or just coincidence?

Comments

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this definitely happens, occasionally, though I don't think it's that major in terms of vacabulary shifts. The best example I know of today is 'niggardly' in English, which is just about impossible to use anymore because of its resemblance to the n-word, despite a complete lack of etymological relation. Of course, in some cases the words might be etymologically related, if one word split into two meanings, one of them better than the other, but they continued to sound alike. I can't think of any examples of this off the top of my head, but there are similar cases, like 'queen' and 'cunt' (which both come from the same Old English word), and 'hussy' and 'housewife', which both come from OE 'huswif' -- it originally just meant 'wife', but then came to mean (and to be pronounced) 'hussy', sometime after which 'housewife' was derived from the original form as a replacement.