The Penis-word Resource

PRSR:Mesopotamia Part III: Išaru (babylonian)

2007-07-09T21:15:40Z

Penis Root Special Report: Mesopotamia

Part 3: Cocks over Babylon

In the first part of the PRSR:Mesopotamia, 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.

It is difficult to resist the urge to write about the fall of the Akkadian Empire, the Gutian dark age, the final magnificent rise and fall of the Sumerians and the invasion of the Amorites. Try as I might, however, I cannot find a good dick angle anywhere between 2100BCE and 1800BCE. Three hundred years of dicklessness, woe betide. We pick up the thread in c.1810BCE when Hammurabi was born in the city of Babylon

Babylon is located on the banks of the Euphrates river about 80km south of modern Baghdad in what is, for the moment, the nation of Iraq. No one is sure when it was founded, although the boast of Sargon that he had it built can probably be chalked up to self-aggrandizing bullshit. The city is one of the elite few that can claim to have been, at one point or another, the largest in the world. In fact, there is speculation that Babylon may have been the first city to reach the 200,000 mark.

In c.1792BCE however, when Hammurabi ascended to the throne, it was a modest city-state surrounded east, north and south by vastly more powerful neighbors. The new king took a few years to secure his hold on the throne and vigorously shake his can of carbonated whup-ass. In c.1787BCE he opened it into the faces of two of these neighbors at once, covering them in the sweet, sugary syrup of war, and how. By his 11th year in power, Hammurabi had succeeded in demolishing these opponents and enlarging his kingdom considerably. The perceived failure of the third (Zimri-Lim of Mari, an erstwhile ally and "best-friend") to come to Babylon's aid in the final war with Eshnunna gave Hammurabi the pretext he needed to meet Sargon's challenge to "conquer what I have conquered" and by c.1761BCE the first Empire of Babylon had been established and Hammurabi, ever modest, had himself crowned The mighty King, King of Babylon, King of the whole country of Amurru, King of Sumer and Akkad, King of the Four Corners of the World. This time there was no certification "by Enlil in Nippur," but that was not necessary anyway, as Hammurabi made sure that the Babylonian god Marduk was elevated to the top of the pantheon.

As with Sargon, Sumerian institutions were respected, but Hammurabi was much more zealous about unifying his country under a single cultural authority. His famous code of laws was one move in that direction. Another was centralizing the exploitation of resources across the whole of the empire, and appointing royal inspectors to make sure it was done right. While town councils still had authority over local matters, the king appointed proxies to take part in their deliberations, and also garrisoned many towns with royal soldiers, who also acted as local police. Even the local judiciary were brought under royal authority. Finally, the stele holding Hammurabi's code of laws, written in Akkadian cuneiform, marked the changing of the guard for Mesopotamian literacy. Starting with official documents, but slowly spreading across all written materials, Sumerian language and letters were pushed aside in favor of Akkadian.

As has been mentioned, cuneiform started life as a logographic system similar in theory to written Chinese. As the system progressed, however, it became an open-syllabary where some glyphs were logograms and others represented mora, essentially a syllable (like Japanese, which mixes kanji logograms hiragana and the katakana syllabaries). By the Old Babylonian period there were just under 600 glyphs left in wide use. The cuneiform USH, our penisy pal, was among them. So let's take a look at how this all would have worked in practice:

This is a made-up cuneiform sentence set in the same bombastic style as the code of Hammurabi and the Epic of Gilgamesh (in fact alot of it is lifted from these two sources). Note the lack of spaces, or any other mark to help you tell what the hell is going on. If it looks like gibberish now, trust me, it gets far worse if you try to take it apart. So let's take it apart.

There are three steps to disassembling Akkadian cuneiform and turning it into a legible, English sentence. Transliteration, normalization, and translation. In the first step, we turn the cuneiform glyphs into the appropriate name of the symbol in English letters. This is nowhere near as easy as it looks, since each of these symbols may be acting as a Sumerian logogram or an Akkadian syllable. And if as syllable, it may be any of a number of sounds. To use the second symbol as an example (the first one is an easy guess, as I'll explain shortly), as a logogram it stands for Sumerian NUNU, or fish. It can also act as a determinative, in which it marks the following word as the name of a fish, and it is the cuneiform logogram for the constellation Pisces. As a syllable, it is primarily the Akkadian sound ha, but occasionally ku and more rarely a, kir, or gir. And every friggin sign is like this. And there's six hundred of them.

The first symbol does help, though. in this sentence it is acting as an unvoiced-determinative which means "what follows is the name of a male." These determinatives are notated by superscripting, and the sign for male is a superscripted "m." So the first line, transliterated, is:

^mha-am-mu-ra-pi
So, a few things are happening here, and there are some conventions to help explain them: as previously noted, the first glyph is an unvoiced determinative. When transliterating, word-boundaries are marked by spaces, as in English, so the lack of spaces here means that the next 5 glyphs all belong to the same word, so are separated by dashes. The fact that the transliterations themselves are all lowercase means that the glyphs they refer to are acting as syllables.

LUGAL KA.DINGIR.RA^ki
Second line contains two words and another determinative. The first sign is being used as the logogram LUGAL. By convention if it's in CAPS it is a logograph. The last symbol in the line, ki is another determinative, it stands for "town" and has a tendency to go at the end of a word instead of the beginning. The three signs before it make up the name of the town. Kind of. Each sign there is being used logographically, so the town name is made up of a few words strung together. The periods between words tell us that they should be grouped together. Interestingly, Kadingira is not the name of the town at all. It is a kind of Akkadian-to-Sumerian multilingual visual pun on the name.

It'll become clear later on. Anyway, third line:

pa-a-shu i-pu-ush-
This line contains 1 and 3/4 words. Note the last symbol is USH! WE'VE GOT DICK! Well, we have the sign for it anyway, but it is being used as a syllable. Moving on:

-ma DUG₄.GA MU-ar
...end of that last word, followed by another word made of logograms. The "4" in DUG₄ means that there are at least 3 other glyphs that can create the sound "dug," (there are in fact 4 others). This symbol was simply the 4th identified. The next word is MU, used logographically, with a modifier on the end that will be explained later. Last line:

GISH-i ra-bu-um
This line contains our penisogram again, and this time it is a logograph representing the word penis (GISH to Sumerians, isharu to Akkadians).

Phase two is normalization, we take the Sumerian results from step one (the stuff in CAPS) and match them to Akkadian words. Finally, in phase three, we translate to English. We'll do these final two steps in a table to show correspondances:

Transliteration	Ha-am-mu-ra-pi	LUGAL		KA.DINGIR.RA	pa-a-shu	i-pu-ush-ma
Normalization	Hammurapi	shar		Babilim	pashu	ipushma
Translation	Hammurabi	King	[of]	Babylon	his mouth	he opens

Transliteration	DUG.GA	MU-ar	GISH-i		ra-bu-um
Normalization	iqabbi	izakkar	ishari		rabum
Translation	he speaks	he says	my penis	[is]	huge

"Hammurabi, king of Babylon, opens his mouth. He speaks, he says 'My penis is huge.'"

I said earlier that the name of the city, written as logographs, would become clear, let me explain that. The city was named "Babylon," or Babilim. No one knows what the name of the city actually means, but there was a folk etymology constructed around the homophonous phrase Bab (gate) and Ilim (gods). The scribes of the era then used the Sumerian translation of that phrase (Ka Dinger) to construct the cuneiform spelling. Incidentally, if you look at the logograph for KA (symbol 2, row 2) it really does look like a gate. A legacy of the pictographic history of cuneiform.

One of the reasons for doing such a long sentence (the main reason was to use the penisogram twice) is so we can look at a couple of verb forms, because it is in these verbs that we see exactly how fucked up it was to bolt cuneiform on to the deeply unrelated Akkadian language. There is a section of three verbs in a row that are handled in very different ways:

The first one (i-pu-ush-ma to ipushma to "opens") is a striaght transliteration, so, easy enough.

The second, though (DUG₄.GA to iqabbi to "speaks") is more interesting. The actual translation into Akkadian would render qabu, or "speak." With many verbs, all that the Sumerogram gives you is the infinitive form. All conjugated forms (with e.g. gender, number, tense, person) must be implied by context. And it is through context alone that we arrive at iqabbi.

The third verb in line is the most interesting. Sumerian MU translates directly to the Akkadian infinitive zakaru (say). What's interesting about this is the modifier -ar at the end. What that says is "the word I am modifying must end with my sound." The form of zakaru which ends in "-ar" is izakkar, "he says."

And there we have our sentence. I feel confident in stating that it may be the most juvenile sentence written in cuneiform in several thousand years and that I lack the common sense to be ashamed of that possibility.

Anyway, the Old-Babylonian empire which Hammurabi founded continued unbroken for 150 years, until the city of Babylon itself was sacked by the invading Indo-European Hittites, who we will deal with in a seperate installment of the PRSR dedicated specifically to that language family if i can ever find a fucking Hittitologist who doesn't start crying whenever genitals are mentioned. So odds aren't that great. The city itself, and whatever remained of its empire, was turned over to the Kassites, a group of uncertain origin who had apparently been taught horsemanship by invading Indo-Aryans [I initially wrote this as "Indo-European Iranians," that is not strictly correct. The "Iranians" perse didn't exist yet. The Indo-Aryans did, and were also Indo-Europoid. Apologies for any confusion]. Their rule over Babylon and much of eastern Mesopotamia lasted over 450 years, and would more than qualify their penis-word for entry in this series, except that they were apparently illiterate. All that survives of the Kassite language is a single cuneiform tablet, some personal names and the names of some gods. Literature in occupied Mesopotamia continued to be written in Akkadian cuneiform.

While Babylon languished under Kassite domination, the focus of conflict in the near east shifted to Syria and the Lebanon which were variously fought over by the Mitanni, Egyptians, Hittites, organized bandits and various angry little tribes caught in the crossfire. The Semitic city of Assur spent most of this time grimly clinging to occasional independence and biding its' time, and it would be the next home-grown Mesopotamian power to rise to prominance, carrying cuneiform with it. It is here that we will pick up with our next installment of the PRSR:Mespotamia Part IV: Nothing Funny Rhymes with Assyria.

PRSR:Mesopotamia Part II: Išarum (akkadian)

2007-07-05T07:19:46Z

Penis Root Special Report: Mesopotamia

Part 2: Akkad and the Imperial (word for) Penis (Išarum)

Sometime around 2400BCE, the high-priestess of the city of Azupiranu conceived a child. She suffered her pregnancy in secret and, also in secret, bore a son. For whatever reason, she set this infant in a reed basket, sealed the lid, and set the child adrift on the Euphrates. some time later, as the basket passed near the city of Kish, a man named Akki noticed the basket, fetched it from the river and discovered the infant boy. He raised this child as his own and the child grew to be cup bearer to the king. At about this time he met and started dating the goddess Ishtar, who gave him a special destiny which required that he murder the king of Kish and usurp his throne. Obviously, this entire story is bullshit. It is in fact an amalgam of two stories about the origins of Sargon of Akkad (Sargon the Great to his friends), a bastard child of humble birth who went on to found the first empire in human history, and to create a multi-generational cottage industry white-washing his lowly birth and justifying his kingship. Even his name, Šarru-kinu, is a piss-poor attempt at justification. It translates, roughly, to "The legitimate king." How's that for overcompensating?

The reason Sargon could command such a hum-dinger of a personal myth is that the Akkadians had appropriated writing from their Sumerian neighbors.

Let me back up just a bit. When the last episode of the PRSR left off, the city-states of Sumer, inventors of Cuneiform, had established a cultural dominance over that portion of the fertile crescent surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. These city states belonged to a now-vanished enthno-linguistic group based around the down-river (southernmost) end of the Mesopotamian flood plain. Make no mistake, the Sumerians were military badasses and regularly knocked the shit out of their neighbors, but they were a disunited lot, and up until near the very end each city battled more for bragging rights, defence and resource accumulation than anything else, probably because no single city had the military resources to hold much more than its immediate surround. Their culture, however, was communicated far and wide, and one of the most important components of that culture was its literacy.

The central and northern ends of Mesopotamia were commanded by a similar collection of disunited city-states, but they spoke Semitic languages related to Hebrew, Arabic and Phoenician. The Semites could not properly be called "invaders," indeed it is equally likely that the Sumerians invaded the floodplain as it is that Semitic-speakers did. In fact, it kind of looks like they both did. The current-most-likely theory is that the Semitic language developed around the area of modern Yemen and then travelled up the Red Sea coastline to what was, at the time, a very habitable savannah along the northern edge of the Arabian desert, finally colonizing central Mesopotamia some time in the 4th millennium BCE.

Shortly after the Sumerians developed Cuneiform script, the Semitic-speakers adopted it as their own. This was hugely problematic, as Sumerian (a highly agglutinative language) was just catastrophically different from Akkadian (a largely inflected one). A very, very brief and oversimplified explanation might be useful: English (as with most languages) makes use of both agglutination and inflection, which is a huge bonus since I am fluent in English, so we'll use it in our example. A morpheme can be thought of as the atom of a language, its smallest meaningful unit. In essence, a word. Agglutination works by joining morphemes together to construct novel meanings (combining the morpheme "point" with the morpheme "less" to construct "pointless"). You can see how this lends itself to logographic writing systems. Inflection works by altering the form of the morpheme itself to indicate a novel meaning (changing "sleep" to "slept" to indicate a change in tense).

By 2500BCE Sumerian cuneiform had adapted phonetic elements into their previously logographic system, presumably because someone with some sense got sick of creating new logograms every time something got invented, and it was in this hybrid form (called logo-syllabic) that the Semites began applying the band-aids required to make it comprehensible to their language.

At about this time, three very prominent cities become important to us: Uruk, Kish and Nippur. Uruk was the predominant city of the Sumerian south while Kish, located in the heart of Akkad, had that regions most powerful military and a long history of rulers with Sumerian names. Nippur had no such pretentions to suzereinity, but it didn't need them: Nippur was the home city of Mesopotamia's chief deity, Enlil the Lord of the Winds. It had also been the city where, when the region had been threatened by external invasion in the far past, the various kings of Mesopotamia would meet to elect a war-chief. To rule over Uruk and Kish (and to be certified by the priests in Nippur) was a thing that had never been done, but to achieve such a feat was to become more than a mere petty-king. And this, uh maybe, was the feat accomplished by Gilgamesh, fifth king of Uruk, when he defeated Agga of Kish in c.2650BCE. Seven descendents of Gilgamesh ruled as King of Uruk and Kish, chosen by Enlil in Nippur until a king of Ur knocked their dynasty off the playing field and re-ignited the ages-old inter-city pissing matches. But the pandora's box had been opened and now a great king knew he might aspire to more prodigious gains.

Until the 23rd century BCE Sumerians dominated the important legal and liturgical roles over much of Mesopotamia. Real overlordship - even when a Semitic town was ascendent - had been more or less exclusively the provenance of Sumerian kings. This all changed when Sargon's celestial girlfriend Ishtar convinced him to murder the Sumerian king of Kish and start fucking up the neighborhood. This he did with world-historical élan, etablishing more-or-less outright control over all of Akkad and Sumer by smashing their armies one after the next and then tearing down the defeated city's walls as a form of symbolic pantsing. Upon conquering Lagash he made the grand gesture of washing his blade in the Persian gulf as if to say "From Kish to here, I own all your asses." Sargon had become the worlds first emperor.

Not content with ruling from Kish, Sargon established for himself a new capital called Akkad (or Agade) and built a presumably awesome (Agade's ruins have never been found) new palace and a temple to Ishtar and another to his patron war god Zababa. He then stuffed his armies full of fresh recruits and headed off east, where he brought the Elamites under his authority (and sowed the seeds of his empire's undoing) and then west where he conquered the Semitic kingdoms of Ebla and Mari and brought the Lebanon and parts of the Taurus under his control. By the end of Sargon's 55 year reign (c.2334 - c.2279) he had conquered, in the words of his historians, the entire world (or an area roughly the size of Poland, whichever). "Now," Sargon is said to have said, "If any king wishes to call himself my equal, let him conquer what I have conquered."

The important point here for us is that, while Sargon kept and respected the Sumerian institutions in his empire, he preferred Akkadian-speakers in those institutions' leading roles. This was the first of several fatal blows to both Sumerian cultural hegemony and to their language as a viable entity. Sumer had its periods of resurgence, to be sure, but their historical primacy was shattered by Sargon and, by 2000BCE the language would be dead in general-use, preserved first as a liturgical language and then as a curiosity until by the first century BCE it had died entirely. The mantle of Mesopotamian linguistic primacy was shifting, inexorably, towards Semitic.

As for penises, The Akkadians kept in use the logogram we last looked at. Unfortunately they kind of ruined the great, dicky look of the Sumerian form. So let's put a new symbol up on the big board:

In Akkadian, the word was išarum (probably pronounced something like EE-sha-room). Obviously they kept, after screwing up, the symbol. This was not always the case, as the transition from logogram to syllabary was not a clean one, but the symbol for penis weathered the storm. Under the Sumerians, it stood both for "penis" (as a logogram) and for the sound "GISH," (as a syllabaric phoneme). Under the Akkadians it retained its logographic place representing the dick, but the syllabaric sound became "USH," at least through Sargon's day. And Sargon's Akkadian Empire is, in fact, where we are signing off for this episode.

We will next look at the Babylonian, Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires, as well as take a closer look at the the cuneiform symbol for penis as it morphed, both stylistically and phonemically over time. All that and some shitty jokes await you in PRSR:Mesopotamia Part III: Cocks over Babylon

I would like to take this moment to extend another huge "fuck you" to Hittitologists everywhere for stalling the PRSR:IE by being prudes and singularly incapable of putting stuff on the Internet for the benefit of others. You all suck.

PRSR:Mesopotamia Part I: Gìš (sumerian)

2007-07-02T09:10:59Z

Penis Root Special Report: Mesopotamia

Part 1: The Origin of Writing and The Sumerian Penisogram

Having stalled on the PRSR:IE for too long, it is time to plough ahead with a different part of the world. So we're going to do Mesopotamia and we're going to modify the format somewhat. This first part will deal with the evolution of writing in the Mesopotamian floodplain, and close with the earliest written form for penis.

From early in the 6th millennium BCE neolithic farmers in the fertile floodplain surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers evolved some of the first complex communities in the world. Simple clay pots, stone farming implements and the remains of temporary encampments gave way to increasingly sophisticated wares and ever-larger clusters of low round or rectangular buildings. These seemed to accrue around simple shrines or temples. As social and material culture developed and population increased, the peoples of this region made several important innovations, among them a unique accounting apparatus known as Bullae. These Bullae were hollow clay spheres covered with impressions made by cylinder or stamp seals. The spheres frequently encased a number of tokens, some of which resemble the latter Mesopotamian signs for 1, 10 and 60 and others which bore graphical representation of items such as livestock. Presumably this rather elaborate mechanism evolved as an early form of contract or some kind of official record, and was designed to prevent tampering: once baked, a bulla could not be opened without breaking it irrepairably, so the information contained within was preserved from the time it was recorded until the time when that record needed to be viewed.

Over the course of the 5th millennium, two distinct cultures emerged: the definitely indigenous Halafian and the possibly intrusive Ubaid. Under the Halafian culture, technological innovation increased dramatically, yielding - among other things - the wheel (likely as a potters instrument at first, but quickly adapted to use on wagons). In addition, we begin to see the first hallmarks of urban planning. Cobbled streets made an appearance, as did huge rectangular granary pits carefully lined with mud bricks. The Bullae also underwent a transformation: the information contained within the bullae began being recorded on the outer surface as well, until by the 4th millennium there was another major advance: some communities said "screw it" to the hollow clay ball nonsense and just recorded the information on a small clay tablet and fired the result. Baking the tablet after imprinting the records and the seal prevented modification, thus maintaining security while simplifying the process considerably. The symbol set in use, already formalizing, continued to grow as new items were added to the accounting ledgers.

By the end of the 4th millennium these clay tablets and the symbols written upon them had advanced to the point where they could do more than just hold statistics. At first what was done could not properly be called writing, but it was something beyond record keeping. For awhile, symbols stood only for themselves (a sumerogram of a cigar would just represent a cigar) and this limited expressiveness pretty badly. But once the Sumerians realized what they wanted, they innovated rapidly and before long abstraction had entered the picture. Also, the writing system itself changed quickly and with an eye towards functionality: initially we had sumerograms, as previously mentioned, which were pictographic in nature. This was apparently deemed rather precious and elaborate so one of the first things that happened is that all the pictures were tilted 90 degrees counter-clockwise to facilitate writing left-to-right instead of up-to-down. They then underwent a vigorous process of simplification until the forms themselves were abstracted. Et Viola! Logogram! The introduction of a simple reed stylus cut at an angle created distinctive triangular depressions on the wet clay tablets and this spurred further abstraction of the written word and, by the opening years of the 3rd millennium, gave the world Cuneiform.

Consequently, the third millennium is where Mesopotamian history gets dicey. See, no one knows who the early Mesopotamian urbanites were, or what language they spoke, as mentioned previously the artefacts of Ubaid settlements hint at early intrusion into the region by a group possibly of Anatolian origin, and certainly the Semetic presence is intrusive, all of which further muddies the water. The increasing sophistication of these communities must have acted as a lure to more mobile populations in the immediate vicinity: Arabia, the Caucasus region and the vast Iranian plateau. The problem for someone trying to construct a plausible story for the region after about the 35th century BCE, is that the progression of image from glyph to logogram had given the world literacy. The vast illiterate period of human history is easy enough to document: The remains of bones, pottery shards, refuse pits and simple clay figurines leave alot of room for making up all kinds of crazy shit; and once literacy is fully active in a region, history becomes a relatively simple matter of figuring out which competing version of the truth is more logical given how things turned out in the end (or what point you are trying to make). But the fuzzy grey line which demarcates the initial advent of literacy is a very different matter. Reports are rare, fragmentary and conflicting. In many cases the polyglot squiggles, where legible, are indecipherable, and even if some madman manages to decipher the writing, it can be a terrible struggle to match the story to our timeline. The 2nd Harvest in the Year of the Moose Rectum might have meant something to the shlep who wrote it, but it sure as hell wont mean anything to us, fifty-odd centuries later. But unfortunately for aspiring PhD students, the writing is there, and has to be factored in to the story somehow. So we're left painting in fairly broad strokes.

So, in broad strokes, the course of Mesopotamian history from the 35th to the 23rd century BCE is steered by a powerful cluster of increasingly bellicose city-states. These city states are populated, mainly, by two ethno-linguistic groups: the Sumerians and a northern extension of Semites who had migrated into the region from the savannah bordering the Arabian desert.

The Sumerian people are a bit of a mystery. They spoke a language isolate probably related to the language of the space aliens (just kidding (or am I?)), but unrelated to any other known tongue. There is a possibility that they represent the last remnant of the indigenous Mesopotamian people, although there is some evidence linking them to the intrusive Ubaid culture mentioned previously. What is known is that when the historical record opens, they were most firmly in control of the southern part of the flood-plain, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers empty into the Persian Gulf. Their pre-eminent cities loom large in the annals of ancient history: Uruk, Eridu, Ur, Lagash, Kish, Nippur.

One of the reasons these cities loom so large is that the Sumerians could make up bullshit heroic stories about them and, thanks to Cuneiform they could preserve these colossal untruths indefinitely. For it was the Sumerians who had given the world Cuneiform and with this innovation the kings of Sumer had finally found a way to make sure that the ridiculous propaganda they wished to pass off as history would outlast the uncouth slurs that their detractors were saying about them.

There is alot more to say about the Sumerians, but this essay, ultimately, is about dick words. The whole reason for this digression into ancient history was to explain a little about the Sumerians, and give some context as to how their writing system evolved, so that the following diagram would make sense:

Dear God I love this picture. Believe it or not, the leftmost element is not some fevered product of my adolescently scribbling hand, but the early sumerogram for penis. It totally looks like a penis! There's even stuff coming out of it! So help me, I have no idea if this image was ever placed in or on a bulla, but the mind absolutely boggles as to why someone might have done so.

Anyhow, in the second element you can see the 90 degree counter-clockwise rotation. Also note the streamlined, spaceage design and how the column now widens towards the base. I don't know why it was added, but my guess is "vestigial scrotum." This all would have happened sometime near the end of the 4th millennium and shows that bias towards left->right writing and a design that is easier to render quickly. The third element is an early rendering of the sign into cuneiform, with the shape now picked out with that characteristic stylus, it would probably have been in use around 2800BCE and is called Gìš. I have, I am sorry, no idea if Gìš was the Sumerian word for penis or just the name of the symbol. But that is manifestly a wedgified abstraction of the first symbol, and the first symbol is either a stick of dynamite or a cock. It is worth noting that a variant of this sign evolves into the sign which also means "slave" and "man" depending on context. "Slave," "Man," and "Penis." That is deep stuff, right there. Honestly it is more complicated than that, but you know what? Fuck complexity. "Man, penis slave" is how I am reading it.

Anyhow, the various city states of Sumer exported more than just their written word. Indeed they had a tremendous impact on all of the cultures they touched, and Sumerian artifacts are found in ancient ruins stretching from the Mediterranian coast to central Iran. The depth of their culture and economy spurred the neighboring Elamites and Akkadians to similar feats, much to Sumer's eventual sorrow. In the 23rd century BCE, the city states of Sumer were overwhelmed by the rising power of their most dilligent mimics, the Semetic Akkadians, who were hell-bent on founding the worlds first Empire. And it is there that we will pick up in PRSR:Mesopotamia Part II: Akkad and the Imperial (word for) Penis. Stay tuned.

I would like to give mad props to enheduanna13, without whom this piece would have been shorter, bullshittier, lighter on dickery and absent the fantastic sumerogram cock.

Noov (hmong)

2007-06-27T22:28:56Z

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.

The various governments of China have never had a particularly cozy relationship with the Hmong, and indeed the word for their government-assigned ethnic group, Miao, is synonymous with "barbarian." Strife, in fact, has underscored much of Hmong history even to our present era. During the 18th century, moaning under the weight of economic barriers erected by the Qing Dynasty and pushed off their land by Han settlement, the Hmong rebelled against Chinese authority. Some chose to stay and fight a bloody conflict, but an enormous number of Hmong migrated south, again, this time to northern Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Let no one say that the French couldn't play the Dickheaded Colonial Power Game with the very very best of them: shortly after the Hmong migrations into Indochina, France made the region into a proper colony, repleat with asinine Colonial Government and oppressive policies dictated from on-high to the hapless natives. One of these policies was that France reserved the right to arbitrarily dictate tax policy at tax-time. In 1896, when Hmong representatives in Laos refused to collect taxes at a rate higher than was advertised, a war ensued. The Hmong got their rates renegotiated, and the French got a bug up their ass about the "warlike" Hmong. By 1918, French colonial dickishness again got to the point where the Hmong could no longer tolerate it and, under the leadership of one Pa Chay Vue the Hmong rebelled a second time. The ensuing war is known to the French as the Guerre du Fou, or "the War of the Insane." The stated goal of the war was the liberation of a Hmong state, and certainly at its' height combat succeeded in plunging a state-sized region (some 40,000 square kilometers) into complete chaos and throwing the French army off their game. In the end, France decided that the best way to bring fighting to a speedy conclusion was to assassinate Pa Chay Vue. This turned out to be correct and his assassination in 1921 lead to the end of a war that French historians still attribute to Hmong savagery instead of French arrogance.

This all gives the impression of the Hmong as a monolithic entity with unified goals, an impression which could not be further from the truth. Indeed, the Hmong have fought on both sides of many wars, even the ones instigated by the Hmong. There were Qing loyalists in Hmong conflicts in China (the so-called Cooked Hmong as opposed to the frequently-oppressed and rebellious Raw Hmong), and there were Hmong fighting for the French colonials in Indochina. The existence of this latter group became quite important to France and, later, the U.S. during the post WWII conflicts in Vietnam.

In the 1960's while the anti-French Hmong were fighting alongside the North Vietnamese Army, a staggering 80% of the Hmong men in Laos were recruited by the CIA to fight as American proxies in the Secret War in Laos. Under the leadership of General Vang Pao, Hmong warriors fought against NVA soldiers along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and protected a massive American/Hmong military base in the fortified city of Long Cheng. Long Cheng was so important that, at its' height, it boasted an airstrip with more air traffic than O'Hare International. By wars' end, some 40,000 Laotian Hmong were confirmed dead and countless more were MIA. After Vietnam and Laos fell into communist hands many of these Hmong became hunted rebels, hiding out in remote locations and staging anti-communist guerilla actions, a situation which continues to this day. Many fled to Thailand in 1975 and remained there until, in the 1990's, the Thai government began a program of (I love this euphemism) "forcible repatriation." This repatriation was sanctioned by President Clinton and created an unusual alliance of conservative Republicans and Human Rights groups which finally managed to reverse the policy and get the Hmong resettled in less hostile countries, including the United States. The final resettlement of Hmong into America began in 2004.

Currently, of the estimated 4 million Hmong speakers worldwide, 15% (270,000) live in the United States, most as a result of post-Vietnam resettlement. This gives the U.S. the fourth largest Hmong population in the world, exceeded only by China (2.8 million), Vietnam (800,000) and Laos (300,000).

One of the Hmong words for penis is noov.

You know what, for sitting through that entire article, you get a second one: khej khem. Also means penis.

EDIT: Reader, gentleman, and resident for-real linguist muckefuck saves my bacon for the fifth or sixth time. From the comments:

Likewise, giving a Hmong word without identifying the dialect also gives an impression of unity which really isn't there. My White Hmong dictionary says of noov:

"Blue Hmong term for the penis. (cf. 'qau'). Sometimes used also by the White Hmong." Under qau one finds:
The penis, the male organ of copulation (tus).
(referring to the organ in humans or animals).
(cf. 'pim' [vagina], 'noob qes' [testicle], 'tsoob' [intercourse].)
'tus qau' is the term used by adults referring to the male sex member. It is also used as vile language in cursing. The term 'tus hnyuv' or 'tus hnyuv qau' is also used but more by children or of children.

Hnyuv by itself can also mean "penis", but its primary meaning seems to be "intestine", so I presume this is a euphemistic use. (Tus is just a classifier for long slender objects.) I can't find any White Hmong word resembling khej khem. In this variety, khej means "crocodile" and khem is part of a word referring to notches made in wood.

Kontol (bahasa indonesia)

2007-06-03T21:44:53Z

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?

Gyoar (shelta)

2007-05-31T00:22:51Z

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!

Pula (romanian)

2007-05-07T21:03:30Z

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."

PwR Update

2007-05-07T04:45:49Z

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.

Daliif (yapese)

2007-04-17T09:22:32Z

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.

Nhurnti (nhandi)

2007-04-11T22:02:14Z

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."

Lingam (idiots) from लिङ्गं : Liṅgaṃ (sanskrit)

2007-04-10T19:04:29Z

Author's warning: All Wikipedia articles on Hinduism are breathless, poorly sourced, and should be considered deeply, deeply suspect.

Siva (Shiva, Puru Rupa, Neelsikandin, Mahadeva, etc) is the principle god in the Shaivist branch of Hinduism and the god most closely associated with linga (properly sivalinga when referencing objects of Siva-associated worship). Siva's origins extend back at least as far as the Vedas, and there is archeological evidence of a widespread cult of linga worship in the pre-Indo-Aryan, indigenous Harrapan Culture (c.3000BCE - c.1700BCE). Whether Siva was the deity of worship in this civilization is open to debate, but certainly by the middle of the first millenium AD Siva had become associated with these items.

So what are linga, and why the hell are they in the PwR? The original, probably-cult, artefacts are stone cylinders with a round top, naturally formed stones of this type being especially prevalent. Wikipedia describes them as "...a rounded, elliptical, aniconic image, usually set on a circular base, or peetham." Linga are frequently manufactured and placed on display in temples and homes, but naturally occuring objects that take this shape are considered especially interesting. And hey, guess what the dick is shaped like?

Now, this shouldn't be taken as the end of the discussion, since linga, both as a concept and as an object, are filled with symbolism and meaning. As the device of veneration, or an icon of godly creation, linga represent many things; a fundamental shape, occurring naturally, reminding the devout of the divine. The oversimplification "lingam = cock" owes much to the importation of mangled hindu ideology by westerners who took the gross form of the belief without bothering to research any of the cultural context. This does a disservice to Hindus, and proves once again that wealthy idiots searching for meaning necessarily pollute everything they come into contact with, like horrible, culture destroying human lamprey.

So feel free to venerate your lingam, and get it into some yoni or whatever, but while you do remember that there is an entire culture that is a little pissed off that their earthly manifestation of the sacred has been perverted into uptown slang for Willy by narcissistic jackasses.

Fasz (hungarian)

2007-04-06T22:18:04Z

Though located in Central Europe and bordered on all sides by Indo-European derived languages, Hungarian is (most likely) a Finno-Ugric language most closely related to Finnish and Estonian. Hungarian has many Turkic and Indo-european words littering the their lexicon, however, which helps complicate efforts to pin down the ancestral proto-language.

It is believed that the Hungarians originally inhabited an area east of the Ural mountains, but over time and under pressure from other nomadic groups, they moved slowly westward into Europe. Around 900CE, these people began a series of incursions into south-eastern and central Europe, culminating in their settlement of Hungary and the creation of the Hungarian Kingdom around 1000CE.

Fasz is a coarse Hungarian term for the penis. Oddly, the word Faszi can be used interchangeably with "man," and is not considered particularly vulgar.

Some interesting uses of fasz, courtesy of The Alternative Hungarian Dictionary:
- fasz kivan: "his penis is out."
- faszfej: dickhead
- fapicsa: Frigid woman, lit. "wooden vagina." Totally unrelated to the topic at hand. But seriously, "wooden vagina?" isn't learning about other cultures awesome?

EDIT: Reader Muckefuck to the rescue again! I forgot the most culturally important moment in the history of the Hungarian language: The scene in Bladerunner where Gaff (Edward James Olmos) is speaking to Deckard (Han Solo) at the sushi station and uses the word "lófaszt" (horsedick).

Sushi Master: He say you under arrest, Mr. Deckard.
Deckard: You got the wrong guy, pal.
Gaff: Lófaszt, nehogy már. Te vagy a Blade Runner.
Sushi Master: He say you 'Blade Runner'.
Deckard: Tell him I'm eating.

The script comes, with some modifications, from brmovie.com!

PRSR An Introduction

2007-04-04T09:47:02Z

Penis Root Special Report
An Introduction

PwR is about to start an exciting new series called the Penis Root Special Reports. These reports will attempt to trace the etymologies of various words for penis from their source in pre-history up through the present. Before we begin, a short introduction might prove useful.

A language family is, obviously, a family of related languages. In the context of the PRSR's when we talk about language families we are specifically referring to a group of proto-languages spoken way back in pre-history, and from which the majority of modern languages descend.

The basic story is this: before man domesticated plants and animals, he lived as a hunter-gatherer in small groups, widely spaced apart. Observations of some aboriginal australian populations (plus some fancy guesswork from smart people) posits that one person would require roughly 10km² in order to achieve a sustainable existence. This number comes from the absolutely invaluable and stunningly awesome Colin McEvedy, who also gives us a population estimate for the upper paleolithic (ending c. 10,000BCE) of something just under 4 million people, worldwide^[1].

Then came the sea-change. Starting with wheat and barley planting in the 9th millennium BCE, isolated groups of humans began controlling their environment, rather than living in stasis within it. The first attempts were probably clumsy, but their effects were permanent. The 8th millennium BCE saw the domestication of the goat, pig and sheep; the cow was domesticated in the 7th, around the same time stone pottery first appeared^[2].

The new lifestyle that arose as a result of livestock raising and agriculture created a society in which specialization was possible. In hunter-gatherer societies, everyone hunts or gathers, but in a society where a small percentage of the population can handle food production, there is some breathing room. Professional smiths, tailors, potters and soldiers begin to appear, as does a ruling class^[3]. More importantly, the excess food allows the population to increase dramatically. As that population increases, these advanced civilizations spread out, killing or assimilating the hunter-gatherers they run across and annexing their lands.

This is the recipe which sees us living in a world where the vast majority of the human race speaks languages descended from a handful of progenitors. More to the point, a world in which the proper-name for Captain McTinkles sounds eerily similiar across multiple languages. And that is where the PRSR enters the picture. It is our goal to create an etymological dictionary for the dick. A Codex of Cock if you will.

It is a weighty and massive story we wish to tell. The history of human language encapsulated in how language records the pecker. Wonders will be beheld, secrets will be unlocked, the narrative will shift between nauseatingly longwinded and preternaturally juvenille in ways that will amaze the reader for 3 or 4 seconds before they realize this has nothing to do with the search term I typed into Google!

So join us, if you will, for the adventure of a lifetime! Either that or just skip the entries marked "PRSR," because they're going to be long and boring.

Seriously, though. You really should stick around for at least one compelling reason: if your authors had any talent at all, this whole exercise would be an unimaginable waste of it! A real train wreck, and everybody loves a good train wreck!

[1] McEvedy, Colin, and Jones, Richard, Atlas of World Population History (1978)
[2] McEvedy, Colin, The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History (2002)
[3] Everyone, Any high-school history book ever written (ever)

Cock (english)

2007-04-04T00:41:15Z

The word cock, equating male humans and fowl, has been with English for a very long time, although the meaning has altered somewhat over the years. From the Online Etymology Dictionary we learn that cocc has been around since Old English, and meant "one who struts like a rooster," in reference to "a pert boy, used of scullions, apprentices, servants, etc." Shortly thereafter, it starts appearing attached to Christian names "as a pet diminutive, cf. Wilcox, Hitchcock, etc." Roughly contemporaneous with this, we see a northern variant, pillicock, which directly references the penis. The Oxford English Dictionary gives us the passage "Mi pilkoc pisseth on mi schone" (my penis pisses on my shoes). This more direct reference was the ancestor of the modern English word pillock, which is now considered harmless to use in casual conversation if you are both British and the sort who would use words like "pillock." The word has also shed its original meaning, and is now roughly analagous to "stupid."

Cock itself becomes a direct reference to the penis at least as early as 1618, but it is unclear whether it evolves into this meaning on its own, is helped by pillicock or if the more vulgar definition was always around in some form, and just took a few centuries to catch up with the literate classes.

Ortabacak (turkish)

2007-04-02T21:13:24Z

Anatolia is the westernmost extension of the asian continent, and an area awash in history. Home to the ancient cities of Troy, Halicarnassus and Heraclea; site of world-changing battles like Granicus, Issus and Ipsus; Anatolia has been part of some of the most important civilizations in world history: Rome, Persia, the Achaemenids and the Byzantines.

Around the 11th century CE, groups of Turkic tribes began settling the region, and by the 13th century had established both their dominance over the region and an empire, the Ottoman, which would last until the First World War, and would cause all Christendom to tremble at the name the Turk. Now that is some bombastic storytelling!

Anywho, the word ortabacak is a euphemism for the penis in Turkish. it literally translates to "the middle leg." Here at the Penis-word Resource we are still waiting for a slang term for penis that translates as "tiny little appendage" or "the 11th finger" and yet is not considered insulting.

PUBLIC SERVICING ANNOUNCEMENT

2007-03-30T22:59:05Z

Penis-word Resource Dong (word) Donor Drive

Hey folks, do you know of a word for penis in some foreign sounding language? Do you know the etymology of a penis-word in our own language? Do you have a good penis joke or anecdote just begging to be shared with the world at large?

This is your chance to get it put on the Penis-word Resource, the world's only repository for words describing male genitalia (fuck you Scientific American)!

Send email to horrible@zang.com with all the relevant data, and any special requirements you have for attribution!

And remember: If it isn't on the Penis-word Resource, it doesn't mean dick!

Usuk (inuktitut)

2007-03-30T22:51:54Z

The concept of cool must be pervasively applied to any discussion of the Inuit, a group of closely related indigenous peoples who make their homes north of the tree-line in North America and Greenland. Obviously "cool" is a bit of an understatement regarding an environment nearly devoid of vegetation and covered in a a layer of permanent ice, but it is most definitely appropriate to a people who survive by hunting Killer Whales and Polar Bears. And that's no shit, the Inuit hunt Killer Whales and Polar Bears. The author can barely hunt a Cheeto successfully and would starve to death if ground beef ever attained the capacity to walk, and these people are out there knocking off giant bears for sandwich meat. The Inuit are also the inventors of the ingenuous kayak, a boat well suited to solitary fishing, as it can be righted easily and is nearly impossible to sink. It seems appropriate to note that the Inuit hunt Killer Whales in their kayaks, and the reader is challenged to find an eXtreme sPort that doesn't look chumpy in comparison to killing a whale in order to eat.

Eastern dialects of the Inuit language Inuktitut have only three vowel sounds and 15 consonants; Inuktitut is also the coolest-sounding language in the world. The very word "Inuktitut" itself is almost too awesome sounding to be believable.

The Inuktitut word for penis is usuk in the Siglitun and North Baffin dialects, uhuk in Natsilingmiutu (cool name) and usruk in Inupiatun.

Special "Every Part of the Walrus" Penis Fun Fact: The Inuit make a type of knife called an Ulu, and occasionaly they use walrus penis-bone, or baculum (called oosick) for the handle. Why walrus penis, you ask? Because until you have tracked a Polar Bear across the frozen tundra, knowing that you either kill it or your family starves to death, you are invited to STFU about what the Inuit make knives out of.

(h/t inks for pointing out that I'd said "penis"instead of "penis-bone" in my fun fact.

屌 : Diǎo (mandarin chinese)

2007-03-29T08:07:34Z

Being godless, communist heathen, the Chinese have largely dispensed with religiously based insults in favor of the much more awesome sex-and-poo fare preferred by all true connoisseurs of language. Although unrelated to the topic of interest, the authors' personal favorite mandarin insult is "èrbī" (二屄), literally "double vagina." Double vagina!

Anyhow, Standard Mandarin, or Standard Chinese, or Beijing Dialect, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and boasts more speakers than any other language on earth: 867 million as of 1999, beating the runner up (Spanish, 332 million) by over double. And since China is about one western economic catastrophe from ruling the planet, everyone would do well to learn how to speak it.

The Mandarin word for penis is diǎo (crazy chinese pictogram: 屌)and can be found in colorful phrases like tā māde niǎo (他妈的鸟), literally "His mother's dick." Actually literally it's "his mother's bird" but Chinese cursoirs tend to use rhymes in their slang, to get around the state censorship apparatus that will one day see pages like this one sent off to be re-educated.

Special Bonus Insult: jiào nǐ shēng háizi méi pìgu yǎn (叫你生孩子没屁股眼) = "May your child be born with an imperforate anus."

Special Bonus DOUBLE Insult: niúbī (牛屄/牛逼) = "Cow cunt."

EDIT: Reader muckefuck has this correction to my diǎo/niǎo derivation: niǎo is actually an example of euphemistic deformation. In older Chinese, this word had the same initial as 屌 diǎo and this was the form loaned into Korean and Japanese. (Modern pronunciations cho and chō from earlier *tyu and tyoo, respectively.) But in the Chinese dialects, the pronunciations of "bird" and "dick" became dangerously close, leading to an alteration in the former.

Chengelele (swahili)

2007-03-28T19:06:47Z

Although Swahili (properly Kiswahili) is the most widely-spoken native language in sub-sahran Africa, it has only about 5 million native speakers (and an additional 50 million as a second language). This is largely due to the enormous number of languages indigenous to the continent (four major families, comprising over a thousand distinct languages).

Over the years, swahili has absorbed a large number of loan words, both from Arabic traders in the medieval era, and from speakers of European languages during the colonial period. In fact, the name "swahili" is not a Swahili word, it is derived from the Arabic word sahel, meaning "coast" or "border." Ki- is "language of," so Kiswahili = "Language of the coast," a reference to the Swahili homeland on the east coast of Africa, south of the Horn.

The word chengelele (pl. machengelele) is a vulgar term for the penis in Swahili.

Shouts out to The Kamusi Project for having the sack to create a foreign language internet dictionary with dick words.

Batuta (tagalog)

2007-03-28T00:51:51Z

Tagalog, also known as Filipino, is the most widely used of the almost two hundred languages spoken in the 7,107 island Philippine archipelago. It is an austronesian language and, as such, is related to Malay, Hawaiian, and Maori.

Over three centuries of spanish colonial rule have added a number of words to the Tagalog arsenal, one such being Batuta, meaning a police baton or nightstick. Local slang has latched onto this word as a slang for the penis.

Bot, Bod, Bwoid (gaelic)

2007-03-27T01:43:45Z

The goidelic languages are among the last surviving remnants of a celtic linguistic horizon which once spanned europe; at their height (c.400BCE to c.50BCE) the celtic culture and language ranged from Spain in the west to the shores of the black sea, with isolated enclaves as far afield as central anatolia. Though the celts were essentially a tribal people, there is good evidence for isolated attempts at government centralization and even state formation (especially in southern Spain and Gaul, where mediterranean celts came under increasing influence from Carthagenian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman merchants). Unfortunately for the celts, they stood in the path of the Roman Juggernaut and their history was brought to a near total end in a series of Roman land grabs culminating in Julius Ceasers' Gallic Wars.

A celtic remnant, the gaels held on grimly at the periphery of Europe, encompassing three different dialects: Irish, Scottish and Manx gaelic.

The Irish and scottish gaelic word for penis is bot (or possibly bod), in manx it is bwoid.

Penis (latin, english, ?)

2007-03-23T20:44:48Z

This really should have been the first entry:

The polite and proper word for the male reproductive organ, "penis," entered the english lexicon in the late 17th century (according to the OED) and displaced the native english word "yard" (which is a little over-optimistic by any standard). It is latin, although the original meaning was "tail," and may derive from the Indo-European *pesnis. Per Wikipedia the latin "phallus" was probably originally used to describe images of the penis, rather than the penis itself.

According to The Straight Dope the latin plural for penis would be penes, but the common english pluralization of "penises" is perfectly acceptable.

Kyrpä (finnish)

2007-03-22T07:51:15Z

The always-awesome Language Log gives us kyrpä as an offensive name for the penis in Finland. As the article explains, Finnish is a rare example of a language without many sex-based cuss words. In fact the lone example phrase cited, "kyrpä otsassa" (a person who has a "penis on his forehead"), refers simply to someone who is disgruntled. Bit of a shame, really.

Chimpo (japanese)

2007-03-21T11:06:47Z

Japanese is one of only two languages in the Japonic language family (the other being Ryukyuan). As yet, no one has found a plausible link between this language family and any other.

The word chimpo (alternatively chimpoko, chinko or, inverted, pokochin) seems to be the most socially correct way to refer to the penis (aside from the overly-precious chinchin). There is apparently a schoolyard variation on the classic Rock-Paper-Scissors game in some japanese gradeschools using "unko", "chimpo" and "pantsu." How this works is left as an exercise for the reader.

Zayin (hebrew)

2007-03-20T22:26:19Z

The modern hebrew word for penis is "zayin," literally the letter in the hebrew alphabet corresponding to the "z" in English. Etymologically it seems to be related to a hebrew word for a weapon, a use still evident in the popular insult "Zayin b'ayin" (literally "a penis in your eye").

Ancient hebrew used the word "basar" which translates as "flesh."