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

[Hugh Olmsted]

heh-heh, Sorry:  in that next-to-last paragraph, make that "...Slavic  
(honey-eater)...," of course.  Much as -ed' can make -ved', haste can  
make waste.

HMO

Begin forwarded message:

> 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


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