Bear (Oral ~ Nasal Correspondences)

[SOUP]

On 27 Feb 2001, Robert Rankin wrote:

> They tend to be tabooed in many cultures (including many Indo-European
> ones: in Slavic 'bear' is 'honey eater' or 'the brown one').

Yes, in Czech - the westernmost Slavic language - bear is called medve^d,
where "med" = "honey" and "ve^d" = "the one who knows of". It is said that
bear was considered so sacred or scary that the old Slavs didn't dare to
speak up its real name and thus used a byname for it (which makes me wonder
what the original name could have been).

Jan