Humans are conceited beings, if you think about it. A great portion of the vocabulary of any language is dedicated to talking about ourselves. About our bodies, their parts, the things they can do. In fact, the field of bodily language is so big that there’s no way I could put it all into a single post, so this part will have to be restricted to just a small portion of it: the bodily organs, the senses, and the actions involving either.
Head to toe
You should have a good idea of what goes into a human body. After all, you’ve got one. We’re animals, mammals, primates…but we’re also humans, descendants of Homo sapiens. Our bodies are all our own, but they follow the same general blueprint evolution has given us. The way we speak of those bodies flows from that, but cultural influences are also in play here. The terminology of the body in English, for example, is a melting pot of ancient words, technical terms, loanwords, and colorful euphemisms. Other languages aren’t much different, though the ratios of these four categories will differ.
But let’s start with the body itself. Look at yourself in the mirror, and you’ll see the basic outline of the human body. We’ve got three major segments, as you might vaguely recall from science classes: the head, thorax, and abdomen. Nobody really talks about those last two in that way, however. Instead, we speak of the chest, the torso, and so on. That’s probably because the idea of humans as segmented creatures came about comparatively late, and as a more scientific endeavor.
The head, though, is the most important. It’s what we look at first, and it’s where we look out from. The head is centered around the brain, and most of our sense organs are arranged around it. We’ve got the eyes, ears, and nose for the senses of sight, hearing, and smell, respectively. The mouth, with its teeth, tongue, and lips, is used for taste, eating, and speech. On top (for most of us), we’ve got the hair—the full covering on one’s head can have the same word as an individual strand, or there can be a count/mass distinction. Other, less interesting bits include the forehead between the eyes and hairline, the cheeks on the sides, the chin at the bottom, etc.
Our heads are connected to the rest of our bodies by the neck on the outside and the throat inside, with skeletal support provided by the spine or backbone, which runs from the brain all the way down the torso. The chest is largely self-explanatory, though it does show one of the sexual differences in our species, the breast. The abdomen’s important parts are all on the inside, except for the buttocks and that other distinguishing characteristic, the sex organs or genitals.
We’ve also got four limbs (unless you’re one of the unlucky ones that had one or more amputated). These come in pairs, because symmetry is good. The arms are up top, ranging from the shoulder where they meet the torso, down the upper arm (English doesn’t have a specific term for this, but other languages do) to the elbow, then to the forearm and the wrist, finally ending at the hand. Hands have a palm and five digits: four fingers and a thumb, with the latter sometimes grouped as a fifth finger. The fingers have joints—the knuckles—and a protective covering, the nail or fingernail.
Our other pair of limbs took a different evolutionary path, thanks to our bipedal nature, but most of their parts have analogies in the arms. The leg begins at the hip, the abdominal counterpart to the shoulder. Down from this is the thigh, which ends at the knee. The knee then gives way to the calf, then the ankle, and finally to the foot. Feet, like hands, have five digits, the toes, but these are less distinct than their upper-body cousins. The bottom of the foot is our interface to the ground, and it is contains the heel at the back and the ticklish sole in the middle.
Lastly, the entire surface of the body is covered in skin. The fingers and toes have nails, as mentioned above. And hair is everywhere, although it’s at its thickest on the head. Sometimes, the thinner hair in other parts of the body grows thicker; the most common regions for this are the chest, armpits, pelvis, and back. Languages might choose to acknowledge this fact with a separate word, but it’s more likely that they’ll use phrases, as in English “chest hair” and “pubic hair”.
Internal affairs
That about covers the exterior of our bodies. Now, it’s on to the insides. We all have a skeletal structure made up of bones, with the spine being the most important set of those. Some of those bones have common names, and many others have medical or scientific ones; besides the ribs, most conlangs won’t need them for a long time.
Bones give us our shape, but we’re powered by blood. It flows throughout the body in various vessels, including the arteries, veins, and capillaries. As with the names of individual bones, these aren’t necessarily terms beginning conlangers need to worry about, but you can put them on your checklist. Other bits of the body’s interior that you might want to name include fat and muscle, mostly treated as substances rather than body parts. (Except, of course, when you pull a muscle. Then you’ll know that it’s there.)
The organs are the big boys, though. These are the systems that make our bodies work. The brain’s the main thing, and we met it above. The heart, the body’s pumping station, is next on the list, and the lungs are the third member of the all-important trinity. Most of the other internal organs are concerned with one of three things: eating, reproducing, or removing waste. Those that have common names include the stomach, liver, and kidneys, among others. And modern medicine has names for everything, something to keep in mind if you’re making a futuristic conlang.
Actions of the body
Our bodies can do many things, some of them even wonderful. Most of the main verbs regarding bodily actions, however, fall into three groups. Sensory verbs are those that indicate the use of the five senses: see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. English, among other languages, also has a set that connotes the “intentional” use of some of these. In addition to passively seeing and hearing, we can actively look for and listen for.
Another set concerns the use of various parts of our body to perceive or move through the world. We can hold with our hands or touch with our fingers, and our feet and legs help us to walk or run. Although it’s more of a mental task than a physical one, we can also think or perceive. Linguistically, many of these verbs will be intransitive or even impersonal, except those that directly affect something other than ourselves.
The third main class of body verbs is concerned with making the body work. We eat and drink and breathe to provide the necessary inputs, for instance. Most of the “other” end of things is represented by a collection of verbs, and that brings us to a point important enough to earn its own section.
The body and taboo
Probably nothing else in the world is the subject of more cultural factors than the human body. Peoples from all around the world routinely censor their own speech when talking about it, resorting to paraphrases and euphemisms when discussing it. Uncountably many slang terms are dedicated to (or derived from) its function. The body, as thousands of years and billions of speakers can attest, is taboo.
These taboos are not random or idiosyncratic. They’re the result of cultural and linguistic evolution, a consensus of a language’s speakers (sometimes intentionally, as in the banning of certain words, but just as often a subconscious following of unspoken etiquette). They’re very much enduring, and they are not at all identical across language borders.
What parts of the body are most likely to be considered verboten very much depends on the surrounding culture. For many, anything coming from the insides is unworthy of “proper” speech. This includes bodily waste, an area where standard English has no fewer than four different forms, including a vulgar, a scientific, a mild “standard”, and a special form for speaking to children. Some go further, putting blood and spit into the vulgar category and requiring euphemisms for them. (In older English, this was the case specifically for Christ’s wounds, one of the causes leading to “bloody” as an expletive.)
Reproductive organs and acts are another area of taboo. For all that we, as a species, love having sex, we certainly don’t like to talk about it, at least not in direct terms. A few simple searches should net you more terms in this category than you ever wanted to know, from F-bombs and C-words to things you never knew you never wanted to know.
In your language
The body of words (see what I did there?) about the human form is enormous. Fortunately for conlangers, you don’t have to tackle it all at once. Most of the major parts of the body have their own basic words, and that holds true across many languages. In English, for example, the only big areas that use derived terms are the forehead, eyelid, eyebrow, forearm, and armpit. Everything else is fairly isolated, so you can make the words as you need them.
It’s also possible to be more distinctive than English. One way to do this is by naming those parts that we don’t have a single word for. The fingers, for example, do have English names. They’re the index, middle, ring, and little fingers. But why does on the smallest have its own name: pinky? That doesn’t have to be the case; many languages do have separate terms for all the fingers. (And some of those use them for counting.)
Most of our “medical” terms for the body ultimately derive from Latin and Greek, our historical educated languages. For an auxlang, it’s a very good idea to follow that trend. They’re internationally known at this point. Artlangs, on the other hand, might want to do things differently. Those in a fictional world could have their own ancient “learned” language, from which the vernacular borrowed its names.
And don’t forget about taboo, slang, and the like. The body, as important as it is to us, is frequently a very private affair. In polite company, we throw up, but among our friends, we’re happy to puke. We’ll teach a child to pee-pee, but a doctor will tell you to urinate. When talking about our own bodies, we come perilously close to speaking a different language entirely.
Next time around
After the usual trips to Isian and Ardari, we’ll be back here for another round of vocabulary. The focus of the next few months will be on the world itself. First, we’re going to look at the lay of the land, where we’ll gain a whole new set of “natural” geographical terms. Then, we’ll see the plants and flowers and trees that inhabit that land. And Part 20 of the series, hopefully coming in October, will see us journey through the animal kingdom.
If all goes according to plan, that’ll mark a time for me to take a break. But never fear. The series isn’t even halfway over. There’s a whole universe of possibilities left to explore.