There used to be in place a highly complex taboo system in Dyirbal culture. A speaker was completely forbidden from speaking with his/her mother-in-law, child-in-law, father's sister's child or mother's brother's child, and from approaching or looking directly at these people. In addition, when within hearing range of taboo relatives a person was required to use a specialised and complex form of the language with essentially the same phonemes and grammar, but with a lexicon that shared no words with the non-taboo language. This phenomenon, commonly called mother-in-law languages, was common in indigenous Australian languages. It existed until about 1930 when the taboo system fell out of use.
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Famous quotes containing the word taboo:
“There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier’s sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.”
—Philip Caputo (b. 1941)
“A man might well pray that he may not taboo or curse any portion of nature by being buried in it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing.... Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn’t the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)