The Penis-word Resource

02:14 pm - PRSR:Mesopotamia Part III: Išaru (babylonian)

, we looked at the rise of the city-states of Sumer, the creation of the world's oldest system of writing, cuneiform, and a just fantastic primitive drawing of a wiener (which became the first written symbol for the wiener). The second installment discussed how Sargon the Great founded the oldest known empire, and how his Semitic people adapted cuneiform (poorly) to the Akkadian language and totally ruined the penis glyph which, oh man, we gotta take a look at one more time:



that totally looks like a dick. It just kills me. Anyhow, in this next bit we take a closer look at Cuneiform as it existed during the Old Babylonian empire of Hammurabi.

12:19 am - PRSR:Mesopotamia Part II: Išarum (akkadian)

02:10 am - PRSR:Mesopotamia Part I: Gìš (sumerian)

12:33 pm - Noov (hmong)

Outside of the Han majority, there are 55 ethnic groups recognized by the Chinese government. One of these groups is the Hmong, although the Chinese government lumps them into a meta-group contentiously called the Miao.

There have been some zany theories as to the origin of the Hmong, including attempts to relate them to Mesopotamian cultures, but the prevailing and least ridiculous current theory is that the Hmong originally inhabited land around the Yellow River, and were pushed south by one of the early Han expansions (possibly in the 2nd millenium BCE). After wandering for an indeterminate period, the theory goes, they settled in or around the modern provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi. Genetic evidence supports Hmong occupation of these regions for at least the last two thousand years.
( More dick stuff after the cut... )

02:06 pm - Kontol (bahasa indonesia)

Indonesia is a nation of some 220 million inhabitants located, conveniently enough, in the Indonesian archipelago. Their language, Bahasa Indonesia is basically Malay with some touch-up paint. By dent of strenuous education by the Indonesian government over the last half-century it has become one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, and this is no small feat considering that Indonesian is spoken as a first language only by the tiny minority of people living around the capital city of Jakarta. Outside of this area, Indonesia boasts between 300 and 700 languages spoken by the various peoples who live scattered around the staggering 17,500 islands that constitute the Republic. Moreover, many of the worlds major language families are represented.


The struggle against foreign colonialism defines much of Indonesia's political underpinnings and has worked to provide at least the appearance of unity. Visited originally by the Portuguese in 1512, the region fell under the influence of the Dutch from 1602 until the Dutch East India company collapsed into bankruptcy in the early 1800's. From there, control was passed to the Netherlands which slowly extended their dominance over the region until the area was appropriated by Japan in WWII. Four days after Japan's formal surrender, the Dutch East Indies declared independence and Indonesia was born. Obviously Indonesia has had rough going since then: Sukarno, the first President of Indonesia, became increasingly enamoured of authoritarianism and was eventually overthrown after a coup and a protected military struggle that left half a million people dead and Suharto, a major-general in the Indonesian army, as head of state. Since 1998 Indonesia has been making dramatic inroads into democratic reforms, but the Rule of Law is still fairly tenuous. For instance, The Strait of Malacca, one of the most important shipping routes in the world, is also the most pirate-infested; also, the province of Aceh has seen a violent islamic seperatist movement, and the country is currently witnessing a slow-motion purge of Christian minorities in an Al Qaeda backed holy-miniwar. Or mini-holywar. Whichever.

All of which has very little to do with penises. At least not in the strict sense. "Kontol" is one of the vulgar terms for penis in Indonesian, it is also a very special entry. You see, apparently kontol is also used as as an exclamation of surprise in Indonesia. That, friends, is fantastic. It is something we as English speakers could (nay, should) learn from our Indonesian friends. As just one example, Leave it to Beaver would have been vastly more satisfying if all the instances of "gee," "golly," and "wow" were replaced by the word "penis."

Wally: Hey Beave, look at this keen racer I made for our Boy Scout soap-box derby!
Beaver: Well... Penis, Wally, it doesn't look like much.
Wally: Aw Penis, Beave, why would you wanna go and say a thing like that?

04:29 pm - Gyoar (shelta)

Ireland is an island off the west coast of Great Britain. It has a population of something under 6 million, and is roughly the size of West Virginia. That's not really very many people, nor is that a very big island, so how the hell they manage to have an indigenous, intinerant ethnic minority is beyond me, but somehow they do: The Travellers (or tinkers if you're being a dick about it) are essentially gypsies of Ireland, and seem to be about as ubiquitously loathed as their continental counterparts (the Irish government does not consider Travellers to be a distinct ethnic group, although English law, possibly just to shit on the Irish a little more, does).

Anyhow, as with most itinerant groups in the world, the history of the Travellers is somewhat obscure and difficult to trace. It can be said fairly definitively that they have been around since the 19th century and one popular yarn has the Travellers being the descendents of people made homeless by Cromwell's... uh... expeditions through Ireland, but there are those who claim evidence that the Norse knew the Travellers as a discerete ethnic group as far back at the 9th century.

The Traveller's language, Shelta is a goidelic language with a vocabulary widely based off of Irish Gaelic. It may have begun its life as a kind of gaelic slang and, as such, displays such interesting features as verlan-like word inversion (which, for some reason, reminds me of cockney rhyming slang).

The Potato Famine and subsequent diaspora spread the Travellers as wide as the rest of the Irish population, and now it is estimated that less than 1/3rd of Shelta's 86,000 speakers still reside in the home country. If any of those speakers were to point at your pants and say "gyoar" it would be a sound bet that your fly was unzipped (and that you were a guy (and that your penis was hanging out (because "gyoar" means penis))).


Cheers to the song "The Body of an American" off the extended release of The Pogues Rum, Sodomy and the Lash which mentions "Tinkers," got me researching why, and turned into this entry.

Mad props to Travellers Rest for their English to Shelta lexicon!

01:07 pm - Pula (romanian)

In 101 C.E. the Roman emperor Trajan embarked upon a series of wars against the Thracian tribes of Dacia in retribution for their numerous raids across the Danube into Roman territory, and the massacre of two Roman legions in 87 C.E. (see the article on the Dacian Wars). By 106 C.E. the Romans had the measure of their opponents, and after a brief siege against the Dacian capital at Sarmisegetusa, they established their first - and only - trans-danubian provence.

As it happens, the Dacian Wars were brief, the Roman hold on the country tenuous, the reign short, and the end barely mentioned. In fact the only reference to the end of Roman Dacia is a line from the writings of Postumius Avienus which reads "under the Emperor Gallienus Dacia was lost." So, naturally, the country is now known as Romania, and their language, Romanian, is considered to be one of the most conservative of the Romance languages, preserving much of the morphology (especially the nominal morphology) of Latin as it was spoken 1800 years ago. Way to not let go, guys.

Pula is a vulgar reference to the penis in Romanian (the proper term is Penis as in English). The etymology of pula is in dispute, and most of the theories are frankly dumb, but it is generally agreed that the word is older than is common for a term to still be considered rude. Among the etymological theories, the one that is most interesting to us is the latin Pullus meaning "little bird."

09:40 pm - PwR Update

The PwR isn't forgotten, to the contrary we have been trying to find a Hittitologist who isn't a total pansy, and the quest is proving difficult. Seriously, here at the PwR we realize penises are all dirty and awful and stuff, but it's also part of the anatomy for which there is a name. We're growing worried that the Hittite word for penis may become lost because all the people studying the language get overtaken by the vapors every time genitals are mentioned.

01:37 am - Daliif (yapese)

The island of Yap! Yes folks, we dig deep here at the Penis-word Resource, and todays digging leads us to the tropical island of Yap. Yap. God we love typing typing that. Anyhow, Yap is an island in the Carolines, an island chain starting about 500 miles east of the Philippines, made up primarily of low coral atolls.

Yap itself is actually four discrete continental islands joined by a connective tissue of coral reefs, the whole surrounded by a low barrier reef. The capital, Colonia, is the administrative center of both Yap itself and 130 or so smaller atolls. The Yapese nation (one of four members of the Federated States of Micronesia) is a polyglot of various south-asian maritime cultures, and the Yapese language is of unknown provenance.

Yap is fairly well known for two reasons, one historical, one awesome. The historical source of their fame is that during WWII, Yap was one of the places bypassed in the American Island Hopping campaign, even though Japanese aircraft stationed on the island did significant damage to Allied shipping. Of much greater import, and possibly the most lasting source of Yapese fame, is their frequently giant stone money. Yes folks, stone money. Forget about penises for a minute, click those links, and marvel at the pictures of boulder-sized cash. There is no word for that except awesome.

Anyway, the word daliif means penis in Yapese. It should be noted that Yapese makes frequent use of glottal stops, especially in words beginning with a vowel sound, and in many word endings. There has been some debate as to how to reresent the Yapese glottal stop in writing, and our word daliif contains one, so we are going with the old-fashioned doubled-vowels. The word should be pronounced with a glottal stop between the first and second "i," as dahli'if.

02:28 pm - Nhurnti (nhandi)

If you look at a map of the Indonesian archipelago, you can draw a line running roughly southwest to northeast and cut it through the channel separating the Indonesian islands of Kalimantan and Sulawesi. This is called the Wallace Line (after explorer Alfred Russel Wallace, who first proposed it) and it is the line dividing the continent of Asia from the rough collection of islands, atolls and shoals known as Oceania. Oh, and Australia, New Guinea, etc. Those are there, too, but they didn't fit the big self-important sentence I was working on so I used artistic license and left them out.

Why this line? Because everything northwest of it contains what Colin McEvedy calls "an up-to-date fauna of placental mammals," while everything to the southeast does not. Australia and some of the larger islands are an enormous zoo hosting the addled and goofy sister-taxon to the placentals, marsupials, who have all-but died out everywhere else on Earth; the smaller islands and those volcanic islands which have never touched a major continent are home only to birds.

This is important because, at the height of the last ice-age, some 40,000 years ago, all of the islands of asia were either connected to the mainland, or within sight of land. Anything beyond the Wallace Line required the enterprising energy of homo-sapiens to reach. A feat accomplished by the ancestors of todays aboriginal Australians.

As the millennia progressed and the ice-age receded, these aboriginal peoples became almost as seperated from the rest of mankind as the marsupial had from their own kin millions of years earlier. To give an idea of how long ago human settlement of Australia occurred, 40,000 years ago Neanderthal Man was still contesting dominance of Europe with our stone-age ancestors, and in fact the existence of people in Australia is the only evidence we have that mankind had invented some kind of boat.

After the ice-age there was some sporadic contact between the Australians, New Guineans and the inhabitants of the wider world. Certainly the ancestors of the Polynesians passed through (even attempting settlement on New Guinea), and it is believed that the inhabitants of the north Queensland coast are late Melanesian arrivals, but aside from these, Australia existed in isolation for the better part of four hundred centuries.

Over time, the languages spoken on Australia diverged markedly. At the time European colonization began, there are believed to been 3 major language families on the continent, and some 350 distinct languages. Thanks to the British tradition of exterminating the natives in order to save them, many of these languages were killed off entirely, and many more are now poorly attested, with no native speakers. In recent years, the Australian government has learned to embrace aboriginal culture to some extent, and the 200 or so remaining languages are seeing something of a resurgence. One of these languages is Nhanda, traditionally spoken in the area around Shark Bay in western Australia. Although Nhanda has no living native speakers, there are still enough second-language speakers around to allow large portions of the languages lexicon and structure to be recorded, a task which has been undertaken by, among others, the Yamaji Language Centre.

And thanks to the fine work of these scholars, we know that the Nandha word for penis is nhurnti, and that this word also means "tail."