FW: [SEELANGS] pronun. of "Medvedev" (cont.)

[Hugh Olmsted]

Dear bear-knowers and honey-eaters,

The generally reconstructed proto-Indo-European form for 'bear' is a  
little hard to represent with the basic Latin alphabet, but I'll   
take a stab at it.  It is the source of Latin ursus, Greek arktos  
(whence our Arctic and Arcturus), Celtic *artos, hence Old Welsh  
*arto-wiros 'bear-man', whence our personal name Arthur.  It's  
represented also in Hittite (hartagas, with allowances for phonetic  
representation) and Sanskrit (rksa with a retroflex s generally  
represented with an s-dot subscript).  The reconstructed form can be  
represented clumsily as something like *h(2)rtKo-s (with 'K'  
representing the "palatal" kind of 'k' that we find also in the  
'heart' word (Lat. cord-, Grk kard-, Slavic *srd-c-, Germanic heart  
etc.).

Notice that the Northern peoples who had reason to know bears at  
closest hand tended to adopt euphemisms.  Hence the Indo-European  
form doesn't show up in Slavic (honey-knower) or Germanic (various  
relatives of 'the brown one', such as English 'bear') and much of  
Celtic.

Jerry, you're not at all alone in your take on the Slavic version as  
'honey-knower' with the apparent re-syllabification from  
morphologically historical medv-ed' to evident med-ved'; it's  
typically been re-folk-etymologized by Slavic speakers the same way.

Hugh Olmsted


On Mar 2, 2008, at 4:25 PM, Jerry Katsell wrote:

> Thanks Bob-- Fair enough <med + u + ed> with ed meaning "eat". I  
> was thinking in a folk etymological way ("ved" = "know") that bears  
> are pretty smart and smell out and therefore know where the honey  
> is. What is the original Indo-European for "bear," which had become  
> taboo and thus substituted out?
>
> Jerry Katsell
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures  
> list [mailto:SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Robert A. Rothstein
> Sent: Sunday, March 02, 2008 11:56 AM
> To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] FW: [SEELANGS] pronun. of "Medvedev" (cont.)
>
> Jerry Katsell wrote:
>> Of course, on the morphemic level, the poor beast can no longer "know
>> the honey"
> [Encoding = Unicode UTF-8]
>
> He doesn't have to; he only needs to eat the honey. Medved' < med +  
> ŭ +
> ěd, with the last root meaning "eat" and the whole word apparently a
> substitute for the original Indo-European word for "bear," which had
> become taboo.
>
> Bob Rothstein
>
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