4 ms·
It was absolutely a thing, and the best example is that the old Indo-European word for bear is eradicated in Northern European languages, because it was thought
by henrikschroder 7y ago
It was absolutely a thing, and the best example is that the old Indo-European word for bear is eradicated in Northern European languages, because it was thought that the true name of the animal would summon it, and bears were not something you wanted around.
So instead of using the taboo name, everyone used the noa name for the animal, a euphemism, which is why "bear" actually means "the brown one". In Slavic languages, a common euphemism the "the honey eater" - "medved".
The original word exists in Southern European languages, "ours" in French, "orso" in Italian, coming from "ursus" in Latin, and "arctos" in Greek.
Another example is the word for wolf, which exists in that form in most European languages (wolf, ulv, vlk, lobo), but in Swedish the common word is "varg", which is a noa-name, a euphemism, meaning cattle-killer. "ulv" still exists in Swedish, but is seen as an archaic fairy-tale word
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y agoThere is also the French saying: "quand on parle du loup, il sort du bois" [1]. Literally "when you speak of the wolf he comes out of the woods", known in English as "speak of the devil". __________ [1] Also: "... on en voit la queue" or "le nez", i.e. "you see his tail" or "his nose".
- bonoboTP 7y agoSame in Hungarian (a Uralic language). Wolf is "farkas", lit. the tailed one, and deer is "szarvas", lit. the horned one. Both used to have true names but became taboo and got lost.
- dcbadacd 7y agoInterestingly Estonian might be nowadays an exception to the trend you mentioned and used the other names earlier. People call wolves and bears respectively "hunt" and "karu" instead of "susi" (the same as to what the Finns use primarily I think) and "mesikäpp" ("honey paw" which has strong connotations to "likes to eat honey") nowadays.