Bears and why they mostly are called otherwise

X99Lynx at aol.com X99Lynx at aol.com
Fri Mar 3 07:16:58 UTC 2000


Someone wrote:
>>To people living in the woods, equipped with spears, "destructive one" is a
>>pretty good name for an animal characterized by large size and bad temper.

In a message dated 3/2/2000 6:19:06 AM, Dr. Stefan Georg wrote:

>Friends, have a look at some Siberian languages; the very fact that these
>fellas can get *really nasty* is responsible for the fact that most people
>who *really know* them   use some taboo word, lest the bloddy beast
>understands its name and comes along to look at who's talking.
>Zoo-goers may use descriptive names for our brown friends, forest-dwellers
>aren't stupid enough to do that.

Not to rile anyone but just to express a minority opinion in the short time
I'm allowed lately -

Being one of those who don't think that there was an any actual word for
'brown" in Latin or Greek, much less PIE, I'd like to suggest a much more
prosaic scenario for words like 'bear.'

Although bears are big and dangerous, you are talking here about people whose
ancestors seemed to make a living out of hunting some big, angry things.
Native Americans even before having acquired gunpowder were extremely
effective at keeping a steady supply of bearskins coming into the European
colonies right from the start, and it was reported that every single colonial
home in cold New Amsterdam had several nice warm bearskins acquired from
indigenous hunters.

Two schools of thought here - one says the bear stood for dread.  The other
says that the bear stood for a warm bear skin - provided by a benign
Providence who nevertheless did mandate some, small inconvenience in
obtaining this gift by attaching it to a bear.  And a
not-very-ecologically-minded Davy Crockett could therefore proudly prove by
an invoice he always carried with him that he once "harvested" 40 bearskins
in a single week.

My little suggestion here is again that brown did not give its name to the
bear, but that the bear's fur gave its name to brown.

I suspect that - as today - most folks back then had more contact with the
by-products of wild animals than they did with the animals themselves -
witness the large number of wild fauna remains at Troy until it appears the
local wild fauna ran out.  And perhaps most folks back then would have had
more contact with bears by way of bearskins than by way of mortal personal
experiences with bears.  Plus bears are not full-time professional predators
being natural omnivores and are also hibernators.  So it doesn't seem likely
that there was a bear assigned to terrorizing each and every IE speaking
village.

Hunters are not the social types.  Merchants are.  And merchants are more
likely to influence what we call things than hunters are.  Our own modern
experience has been been that we've eaten or worn more fox, sable, buffalo,
mink, beaver, alligator, shrimp, salmon, tuna and crayfish than we'd ever see
alive.  I know that I've seen more cowhide than I've seen cows.  And of
course merchants make up names as the market demands.  In the US, we can
order a fish called a scrod.  Sardines are little fish that come in a can.
It's beef, not cow meat.  And though I've looked I've never seen a veal, a
suede or a leather scampering around out there.

And that may be why bears are mostly called otherwise.  Bearskins.  And the
word for bearskin may have become one word for brown.

I don't think there's much evidence that ancients were often terrorized BY
wild animals, but there is a lot of evidence that they often terrorized wild
animals.  Read Homer's description of lions - most are showing great courage
and its much too much courage of course that gets them killed by guess who...

And also in Homer - being of a seafaring people - by far the most important
bear is the one in the sky that marks north - arktos giving its name to the
artic not because that's where bears live, but because of Ursa minor and the
north star. And of course its hard not to look at L., ursa (bear) without
thinking of Gr., bursa (animal skin).  But of course if a bear knew that you
were thinking that way, that might make that bear pretty darn mad.

Regards,
Steve Long



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