몽골 유목문화 속 여성 금기어 연구

The Study of Women’s Taboo Terms in the Mongolian Nomadic Culture

This article looks into various social and cultural aspects of women s taboo terms in Mongolia. In nomadic culture and tradition Mongolian women used to play an important role in managing harsh nomadic environments. This would also be true till the present time in Mongolia. Yet social and cultural studies on Mongolian women are not so common in comparison to that of Mongolian men. For this reason, social and cultural perspectives focusing on Mongolian women are required. Hence in this paper I intend to approach Mongolian women s taboo terms in order to scrutinize nomadic tradition and culture concerning Mongolian women. It is possible to divide taboo terms into two categories such as taboo language and taboo tales. The former is normally an interest of linguistic studies whereas the latter is chiefly dealt with in folkloric and cultural researches. In addition taboo tales are often called morphological taboo terms since they have a special morphological structure namely a conditional phrase and a consequent result phrase. In this paper I will apply linguistic as well as folkloric perspectives of taboo terms in the process of analysing Mongolian women’s taboo terms. Some of distinctive characteristics of Mongolian women s taboo terms are as followed. Firstly, in the context of morphological taboo there are many taboo terms towards pregnant women. This kind of taboo terms in Mongolia show that they are highly restricted to behaviour as well as language practice. Secondly, not only specific body terms are regarded as taboo language but also certain names are dealt as taboo terms. Thus in these cases euphemism is indirectly used instead of taboo terms.