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We literally don’t know the oldest word(s) for “bear” as a result of this sort of practice. bear means “the brown one”. The common explanation is that bears we
by hprotagonist 7y ago
We literally don’t know the oldest word(s) for “bear”
as a result of this sort of practice.
bear means “the brown one”. The common explanation is that bears were either objects of cultic veneration or seen as kinda human or some combination thereof, so their true name was hidden — as a measure of respect or fear or honor. or some combination of the three.
Allusive and indirect names then got applied to “bear” too — a common scholarly opinion is that “Beowulf” is “Bee-hunter”, a bear. (Though opinions differ there).
https://www.etymonline.com/word/bear https://www.etymonline.com/word/bear
- 0xBABAD00C 7y agoIn Russian it's 'medved', i.e. the one who knows about the honey ('mead-wit' would be the exact English cognate).
- hprotagonist 7y agois it “knows” or “eats” or “finds”? i’ve heard all three
- 0xBABAD00C 7y agoved = 'know' in Slavic, comes from this PIE root: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/weyd- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
- nbabitskiy 7y agoLiterally the same source suggests that "honey-eater" is a folk etymology, probably false: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/medv%C4%9Bd%D1%8C https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/m...
- paleotrope 7y ago"Know" in the biblical sense.
- kmm 7y agoI'm afraid that is a folk etymology, the second part means "to eat", related to contemporary Russian есть "jest'". The /v/ sound actually comes from the short /u/ at the end of the word medъ, usually denoted with the letter ъ, probably through an intermediate /w/. The yer, ъ, became silent in Russian and was removed from the orthography in 1918, but a relic of it remained like this in the middle of the word medved'.
- 0xBABAD00C 7y agoTIL. Ok, so it's "honey eater" then. The point is it's clearly a taboo avoidance term, not a derivation of "arctos" which was the real word for bear.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> We literally don’t know the oldest word(s) for “bear” as a result of this sort of practice. Your link doesn't support this. Latin and Greek are supposed to have preserved the Indo-European word; e.g. Spanish oso today descends directly from the word you're referring to. Of course we don't know the oldest word(s) for anything, because the information is lost over time. Proto-Indo-European is as far back as we can reconstruct, but it's not like the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans couldn't speak.