Req: "dirty" words in Sanskrit

Gary J Hausman gjh8 at columbia.edu
Sun Nov 3 23:50:46 UTC 1996


	The same qualification holds in Tamil. The Tamil word "mulai"
meaning "(woman's) breast" is generally considered inappropriate for
polite company in contemporary speech, yet was obviously used in ancient
Tamil poetry without such connotations. According to K. Paramasivam, when
he encountered that word in a text being taught in one of his Tamil
classes (at American College in Madurai), he would skip over it, without
comment.







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