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In Russian it's 'medved', i.e. the one who knows about the honey ('mead-wit' would be the exact English cognate).
by 0xBABAD00C 7y ago
In 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.