“How do you say 'taboo' in Witch?” I ask.
Reconstructive linguistics is both art and science. My linguist friend is not only conversant in the Anglian dialect of Old English spoken by the Hwicce, the original Anglo-Saxon Tribe of Witches, but is capable of saying what the word would look like if it had survived through the centuries to our day.
Since neither the Hwicce nor their modern Witch counterparts were/are big on religious prohibitions, there's no direct correlation of either concept or vocabulary in this case. He makes several suggestions according to the precise nuance that one is looking for.
Then the arrow strikes home.
“In the religious sense of 'something with dangerous sacred power', I'm thinking wigh,” he says.
(Rhymes with high.)
We have now entered the realm of intrinsic cultural difference. In modern English, we tend to use the word 'taboo' to mean something forbidden.
(Arabic uses the word harám in very much the same way. Believe me, one doesn't live in the Middle East for very long before getting thoroughly sick of hearing the word haram. Translation: “You can't do this because my religion forbids it.”)
That's not what the pan-Polynesian word tabu meant, though. In the pre-christian thought-world of Old Polynesia, tabu was...well, quite precisely, “something with dangerous religious power.”
I recognize the rightness the instant that I hear it. The word not only gives us back a lost piece of ancestral vocabulary, but through it we re-enter the thought world of the ancestors. Such is the power of reconstructive linguistics.