Taboo Deformation and the Bear.

The wolf is known in Mongolian as чоно (ᠴᠢᠨᠣ᠎ᠠ), but its avoidance names include хээрийн нохой (ᠬᠡᠭᠡᠷ᠎ᠡ ᠵᠢᠨ ᠨᠣᠬᠠᠢ) kheeriin nokhoi ‘dog of the steppes/wilderness’ and хээрийн юм (ᠬᠡᠭᠡᠷ᠎ᠡ ᠵᠢᠨ ᠶᠠᠭᠤᠮ᠎ᠠ) kheeriin yum ‘thing of the steppes/wilderness’. The two are marked as euph. in my Mongolian-English dictionary and the former as 讳称 huìchēng ‘taboo name’ in my Mongolian-Chinese dictionary.

The wolf is also called боохой (ᠪᠣᠬᠠᠢ) bookhoi, another euphemistic name.

The bear in English is also called ‘bruin’, which, according to Wiktionary, is from “Middle Dutch bruin ‘brown’ via William Caxton’s 1485 translation of a Dutch version of the legend of Reynard the Fox. Bruin is the bear, named for his brown color”. Didn’t know that!

I doubt if goupil, the older French word for ‘fox’, became taboo. Rather, Reynard was so popular that in telling a story one no longer needed to say Renard le goupil, as everyone knew he was a fox, and so lower-case renard became a word for any fox. The character in German is Reinecke, -icke, though the French form presumably comes from Reginhard ‘strong counsel’, later folk-etymologized as ‘rain-resistant’ in the sense of rain of blows.

Nobody knows the etymology of bunny, except that it is obviously a diminutive and that it once referred to squirrels rather than rabbits. Emerson (not our guy) wrote a little poem about a squirrel named Bun:

The mountain and the squirrel
Had a quarrel,
And the former called the latter
“Little prig.”
Bun replied,
“You are doubtless very big;
But all sorts of things and weather
Must be taken in together
To make up a year
And a sphere.
And I think it no disgrace
To occupy my place.
If I’m not so large as you,
You are not so small as I,
And not half so spry:
I’ll not deny you make
A very pretty squirrel track.
Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;
If I cannot carry forests on my back,
Neither can you crack a nut.”

Similarly, the lullaby:

Bye, baby Bunting,
Daddy’s gone a-hunting,
Gone to get a rabbit skin
To wrap the baby Bunting in.

was often sung to me as a child at my request, and “Bun” became my family nickname.

Mongolian word for bear is likely an euphemism too. From a word meaning “father, grandfather, ancestor”

I see that JC wrote faster than I did! But we agreed, which is the main thing.

We had some bear etymology talk a few months ago, e.g. http://languagehat.com/med-vay-deva-whatever/#comment-2763082 about Ringe’s theory that English “bear” is from PIE *ǵʰwē̆r- and there is no *bʰer- root at all. *ǵʰwē̆r- would also be taboo avoidance; it would mean they simply called the bear “beast”. The same root gives us feral/ferocious and Greek θηρίον.

That’s probably what happened to Slavic bear.

Cause it was originally called in Slavic just like in Germanic language – ber (brownie).

There were plenty of avoidance words for the bear in Slavic, they just didn’t happen to be stabilized in most of the extant branches (even then, I’m not sure about Bulgarian mechka).

Is there any actual proof of this theory, or is it all based on the fact that there is more than one root for bear among Indo-European languages. “Brownie” could as easily become the name because northern Europeans were aware of white bears further north. What kind of bear did you see, a white one? No, a brownie.

By the way, the rock-solid reason that renard is not a taboo-avoidance word is that foxes just aren’t frightening. If you’re larger than a rabbit. Some of the nature-word etymology I see seems uninformed by any actual experience of nature. I recently followed a link to someone supposing that the etymology of beaver was something like “carrier.” You would have to ignore a lot, about beavers, about other creatures, and about what it means to carry or bear something, to settle on carrying as the defining quality of a beaver. Even when they do transport a branch, they are overwhelmingly pullers or draggers.

eg Russian ‘berloga’ “bear’s lair”, West Slavic placename Berlin.

For tens, if not hundreds, of taboo names for ‘bear’ in Ob-Ugric see Marianne Bakró-Nagy’s 1979 book ‘Die Sprache des Bärenkultes im Obugrischen’, Budapest.

Fred: ‘Die Sprache des Bärenkultes im Obugrischen’

Yes. Taboo replacement has as much to do with cult and supernatural powers as with real-life danger. But no doubt the two are intertwined.

I remember hearing something about Russian bear tamers being descended from an old class of bear priests. Probably very speculative, but I think there was some linguistic evidence for it.

SFReader: eg Russian ‘berloga’ “bear’s lair”, West Slavic placename Berlin.

Ксёнѕ Фаўст: The etymological dictionaries I have connect берлога with a verb *bьrliti ‘litter, scatter garbage’ (attested in several daughter languages), probably of ‘onomatopoeic’ (ideophonic?) origin.

Onomatopoetic origins are common, but litter is not a bird. Shouldn’t sound at least be a defining characteristics of the object? Ideophonic is a bit wider, but I don’t much like sound-symbolic origin for anything either. It may change the semantics, though, as a source of contamination.

Seeking connection with Germanic ‘bear’ (via borrowing or cognacy) seems to have gone out of fashion a long time ago. Btw, the word doesn’t refer just to bears in other Slavic languages. How/Whether all of this relates to Berlin, I have no idea.

I should have remembered ‘berloga’, but if it can’t be analysed within Slavic, it’s not really evidence of anything. Superficially it looks rather Germanic, fashion or not. Ber having a wider use in other Slavic languages would be supportive of Ringe’s etymology, if it weren’t for the inconvenience that *gʷʰ- doesn’t yield Slavic b-.

I thought the “bear” of Berlin was a Germanic folk etymology.

There is also a tradition of giving protective names to children, using the names of these so-called taboo animals. So in Croatian: Medo, Metko, (bear); Vuk, Vukan (wolf). Slovenian: Metka. Italian: Urso, Ursula (bear). Gothic: Ulfila (wolf).

And still nobody dares to tell them it’s atlas obscurus?

My Latin sucks, but as far as I could guess from what I could figure out from Wiktionary, it should probably be atlas obscurorum.

I might be misinterpreting what they intended by it, however.
(Besides, chances are it’s probably a direct quote from somewhere.)

If the “true name” was genuinely taboo (never uttered), how did it get handed down the generations?

And how do we know there weren’t many iterations of a “true name” falling into disuse; being replaced by a euphemism; and that becoming taboo?

@David Marjanović: In America, schlepp just means transport wearily. There’s no particular implication of the burden being dragged, although drag itself is often metonymic with the same meaning.

And still nobody dares to tell them it’s atlas obscurus?

Per WP, “In late 2017, following another funding boost of $7.5m, the site launched Gastro Obscura, a food section covering ‘the distinctive food locations of the world.'” [Bold added.] Yuk.

Beowulf

How do you know taboo deformations are not kennings and vice versa?

Brett: I’m a bit of a fan of historical nature artwork, and you can kind of see when bears became (nearly) extinct in various countries. Illustrators who have never seen a live bear tend to draw their faces wrong, so that they resemble canids, felids, or mustelids.

I like those too, and I am especially interested in depictions of the tiger, then and now. You can find hundreds of tiger pictures on the internet, but popular representations (“a tiger in your tank”, etc), including children’s toys, are not at all tiger-like, they tend to look like dogs with stripes. A few years ago WWF (I think) promised a tiger toy to people who donated a certain amount of money. I would gladly have done so but the photograph of the toy was all wrong, basically a (not very resemblant) dog.

northern Europeans were aware of white bears further north. What kind of bear did you see, a white one? No, a brownie.

Polar bears are very large, and so are the Kodiak bears of coastal Alaska, which are dark brown. But their heads and necks are quite different in shape, and they don’t have the same habitat. I would be surprised if indigenous people who might be familiar with both did not have quite different words for the two subspecies.

(Besides, chances are it’s probably a direct quote from somewhere.)

I bet it’s from camera obscura.

If the “true name” was genuinely taboo (never uttered), how did it get handed down the generations?

Evidently it became more taboo in some branches than in others, and in those it really was lost.

And how do we know there weren’t many iterations of a “true name” falling into disuse; being replaced by a euphemism; and that becoming taboo?

We don’t. See above on the morphological complexity of h₂ŕ̥tḱos as evidence that it’s already a replacement.

Here’s John Cowan bringing it up the year after.

A bit farther down there’s more on berloga, notably its lack of *e, followed by “runaway euphemisation” of bears in Russian, by foxes being taboo in Irish, by wolves being taboo in Turkic and Mongolic and of course by bears being taboo in Baltic and Welsh.

Merci JWB!

Picard: grizàr

Picard is a Northern French dialect. This word is obviously equivalent to Standard French grisard, a derivative of French gris ‘grey’ (with the often derogatory adjectival/nominal suffix -ard, of Germanic origin).

PIE *h₂ŕ̥tḱos, Greek arktos, etc

The consonants are the same, but the medial ones seem to have been subject to metathesis in Greek (and Latin, etc), thus PIE *-tk- ending up as Greek -kt-, the latter a common sequence in Greek, with -tos a common suffix.

This means that the original root is approximately (h)art-, as in Hittite hartagga (if I remember correctly). Is the same root in Greek Artemis, a goddess whose cult included a rite where little girls were disguised as bear cubs? And what about the Basque word for ‘bear’, arth? a coincidence, or a borrowing from, perhaps, Celtiberian?

I can’t comment on the alleged etymology, but if nudity is taboo, why are there so many statues of naked humans in Greece, especially men? Fully naked, or with some skimpy accessory leaving nothing to the imagination?

Sometimes metathesis just happened for reasons no longer recoverable, cf. Slavic *zьdati ‘build’, Lithuanian žiesti ‘form from clay’ from *ǵʰ(e)idʰ- vs Slavic *děža ‘kneading trough’ from *dʰoiǵʰ- (cf. English dough with no metathesis). Somehow Proto-Balto-Slavic speakers saw it fit to swap the consonants in the verb but not in the noun. Was this connected to some construction magic or taboo? To me it’s as good an explanation as none.

I should have remembered ‘berloga’, but if it can’t be analysed within Slavic, it’s not really evidence of anything.

Берлога totally can be analysed within Slavic; the suffix -ogъ (feminine variant: -oga), while not very common, is found in several other deverbal nouns, e.g.: rarogъ [kind of falcon or mythological bird] from *rarati ‘make loud, shrill noises’, Ukrainian вертьог ‘burrowed hole’ from вертіти ‘bore, turn’, Serbo-Croatian krtog ‘garbage (dump)’, Bulgarian крътога ‘animal lair’ vs къртя ‘I tear off’.

Onomatopoetic origins are common, but litter is not a bird.

In my experience, using ‘onomatopoeic’ to mean something like ‘sound symbolism’, ‘ideophone’ is a widespread disease of etymological dictionaries, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing the word where one clearly cannot speak about natural sound imitation. Somehow eminent linguists appear to be ignorant of the latter terms. Maybe they are only fit for Native American and African savages?

Wikipedia gives the standard explanation: “may be related to the Old Polabian stem berl-/birl- (‘swamp’).”

The root bьrl-, if that’s what is meant, does occur in words meaning ‘puddle’ or ‘mud’ in some Slavic languages, but also ‘seethe’, ‘bubble’, ‘garbage’ and ‘dirt’ (generally, it describes various intense/chaotic/disorderly phenomena). It looks like ‘swamp’ is a huge oversimplification, although I suppose it’s better PR for the city than ‘garbage’.

The consonants are the same, but the medial ones seem to have been subject to metathesis in Greek (and Latin, etc), thus PIE *-tk- ending up as Greek -kt-, the latter a common sequence in Greek, with -tos<i< a common suffix.

The metathesis is regular. It seems to have happened at the base of the crown-group; Anatolian and Tocharian lack it.

This means that the original root is approximately (h)art-, as in Hittite hartagga (if I remember correctly).

Well. *h₂ertḱ- (morphophonemic transcription; *e next to *h₂ came out as [a]) and *h₂retḱ- both wouldn’t fit the phonotactic restrictions on roots, but I’m at a loss to explain what a suffix *-ḱ- or *-ḱo- could be doing here, and neither *h₂ert- nor *h₂ret- are known to Wiktionary at any rate. We seem to be looking at something with a complex history. Wiktionary does know a root *h₂er-, but it means… “nut”.

Is the same root in Greek Artemis, a goddess whose cult included a rite where little girls were disguised as bear cubs?

Perhaps, but if so, the name can’t be of Greek origin because it lacks the *-ḱ-.

And what about the Basque word for ‘bear’, arth? a coincidence, or a borrowing from, perhaps, Celtiberian?

That’s Welsh, not Basque. 🙂 The Basque word is hartz, though, which is certainly similar. A correspondence PIE *h₂ ~ Basque h might have one precedent in the PIE “white/bright/silver” root *h₂erǵ-, which makes me appreciate just how incomplete the Wiktionary appendix is, and Basque hargi “light, bright”.

Thanks David for the corrections.

I had recently read something on Basque and was struck by the “bear” word. Obviously I did not remember it correctly.

About “Artemis”: With the survival, adoption and other manipulation of deities in ancient mythologies, it would not be surprising if this name was not Greek nor based on a Greek root.

Trask’s Etymological Dictionary of Basque says, s.v. hartz, artz: “Possibly attested as Aq[uitanian] HARS- in male names like HARSUS (M. 1961a: 219). Scholars from Schuchardt onward have tried to see this as a loan from Celtic, but the probable Celtic nom. *artos should have yielded *(h)artotz, not the observed form.”

In some rural Polish the stork is known as wojtek, which is a diminutive for Wojciech.

@ryan: Besides fear, another reason for taboo replacements was avoiding to alert prey by naming it. That’s why traditional hunters’ language has special names for hunted animals.

No – as in modern Greek, plosive clusters became fricative + plosive.

Oh, right. I picked the counterfactuals from memory of previous play with the word and forgot. What I assumed then was that the *t would have fallen off before Grimm. But…

But never mind, because I overlooked the metathesis, too!

I’ve not been aware that the metathesis is considered regular in Core IE (or maybe Core Core IE). I may have wasted a lot of time, then. But does the metathesis work for Celtic?

We’d actually land at a much less weird-looking *urxtaz.

It does look better, but it’s still a rare cluster in Germanic. The only example I can think of is Cont. Gmc. *furhta- “fear”, and even here the attested forms are a mess of u and o and Vr and rV. Modern German has Furcht.

There is a name element Ort- in the names Ortwin and Ortrun. It’s explained as yet another term for the edge of a sword, but who knows?

Would the *x disappear between PGmc and German, or would it have to have been lost earlier?

I’m impressed by Trond Engen’s etymologies! The Turkish for badger is “porsuk”, and Nişanyan’s etymological dictionary gives it as being from old Turkish (possibly derived from ‘boz’, meaning ‘gray’, usually referring to animals).

Matasović, in Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic, writes on *tasko: “OIr tadg < *tazgo-. It is unknown why Goidelic replaced the cluster *sk with *zg (dissimilation in voicing with the initial *t?).” Also, “There are also reflexes of the Gaulish word for ‘badger’ in VLat taxo and in various Romance dialects [taisson, tasso, tejón] (some believe these words were borrowed from Germanic, but initial t- points to Gaulish).”

He also has *brokko- ‘badger’ (MIr brocc, MW broch, MoBret broc’h, Gaul. Broco-magus). “The word has no known cognates in other IE languages, and it has all but replaced the inherited word for ‘badger’, *tasko-. It may have been borrowed from some non-IE language into Proto-Celtic.”

But does the metathesis work for Celtic?

I guess so… I don’t really know.

It does look better, but it’s still a rare cluster in Germanic. The only example I can think of is Cont. Gmc. *furhta- “fear”, and even here the attested forms are a mess of u and o and Vr and rV. Modern German has Furcht.

u/o messes are common due to paradigmatic levelings. Ringe 2013 has several pages about them, IIRC. One is northern *wulf- vs. southern *wolf-.

*berxt- immediately comes to mind, where German has both (-)bert(-) and -brecht in names (sometimes in the same name: Albert, Albrecht) and full preservation in the Perchten.

(The main hitch in this is *-kr- versus *-(r)þr-, for which I have figured out a new line of explanation.)

Intriguing.

The expected outcome of *h₂ŕ̥tḱos in Germanic depends on the expected development of the “thorny” clusters. The evidence is sparse. PGmc. *ɣuman- ‘human being’ must be ruled out because we know that DG-type clusters were simplified to G- word-initially before nasals (also syllabic ones). The same may have happened before *j in the etymon of ‘yesterday’ (cf. Skt. hyas). *tetḱ-tlom ~ *-tlah₂ ‘adze’ probably lost the *t of the suffix early (cf. Slavic *teslo ~ *tesla). OIc. þexla, OHG dehsala suggest that *-tḱ- yields Germanic *-xs- word-medially. If so, one could expect *urxsaz in Proto-Germanic. Which makes me wonder if Lat. ursus isn’t by any chance a loan from Germanic.

I read that as Katz being dismissive of the Hittite link.

The key word there is pace ‘we respectfully disagree with’.

*brokko-

English brock is of course a loan from Celtic into OE rather than a cognate. There is a family of hobbits, living both in the Shire and in Bree, called Brockhouse, alluding to the resemblance between hobbit-holes and badger setts.

Which leads to Kevin Wald’s mnemonic for the Celtic borrowings in OE, to the tune of “Do, a deer, a female deer”:

Dunn, a broc or assa‘s hue;
Staer, what dry and ambeht tell!
Rice, carr-strewn torr and cumb;
Clucge,cross-decked ancor‘s bell!

Bratt, a cloak not cine-thin;
Luh, a funta‘s overrun!
Bannoc, cake kept in a binn;
And with gafeluc we’re done, done, done, done . . .

These words are respectively ‘brown, dun’, ‘badger’, ‘donkey, ass’, ‘story’, ‘magician’, ‘service’, ‘power, kingdom’, ‘stone’, ‘tower’, ‘narrow valley, coombe, cwm’, ‘bell’, ‘cross’, ‘anchor’, ‘cloak > ragged garment > unruly child’, ‘folded sheet of parchment’, ‘pool, loch/lough’, ‘spring’, ‘cake, bannock’, ‘bin’, ‘kind of spear’. Some may be directly or ultimately from Latin, or routed into English from Old Norse.

Does the Persian word for bear keep the initial laryngeal of PIE?

Danish had rødkælk after German Rotkehlchen = ‘red throat.DIM’ which is the same idea as in French. (-kælk is a cranberry morpheme in Danish).

For some reason this was deemed incompatible with modern scientific principles and we are now supposed to say rødhals. But a pox on that.

It doesn’t have to be ME. The owl word had /uː/ until the GVS (even it was spelt ou or ow), while shovel comes from OE sċofl ~ *sċufl, whose intervocalic [v] was variably vocalised/lost in ME, hence the numerous variants (which survived well into Modern times). Outcomes with /uː(ə)/, /oː/ or /ɔʊ(ə)/ seem to have coexisted in ME (in addition to those with /-v-/) and their reflexes continued to be used later (cf. Scots shuil, earlier also shoul).

suggest that *-tḱ- yields Germanic *-xs- word-medially.

Oh, that makes sense: PIE *|TT| = */TsT/ > PGmc. *ss; PIE *tḱ > *tsḱ > *ḱts > PGmc. *xs (**xss being phonotactically impossible).

If so, one could expect *urxsaz in Proto-Germanic. Which makes me wonder if Lat. ursus isn’t by any chance a loan from Germanic.

I was wondering about that u-…

While I’m at it: the German cognate of shovel, Schaufel, is one of the few words that has a short /f/ south of the White Sausage Equator (where consonant length is generally kept). Being attested with both f ~ v and with b in OHG*, it seems to be an example of “Bahder’s law”, a strange devoicing of PGmc. fricatives (before the West Germanic *[ð] > *[d] change!) before resonants in most but not all of the speculative dialects that ended up contributing to OHG. Google seems to think nobody has ever mentioned this except for Guus Kroonen in his 2011 book; IIRC, Bahder’s publication dates from 1901.

* Oh, and the Swabian-looking last name Schäuble looks like it’s the diminutive of this word in b-form.

John Cowan,

Good and helpful poem!

Doesn’t ambeht originally refer to the person, a retainer –with Welsh amaeth, Latin ambactus, Gothic andbahts, etc. from the same Celtic root– rather than to the services one may provide?

But if we include (other) Celtic borrowings into common Germanic, then we would have a much longer list…

So is French ambassadeur!

Marie wrote
> I would be surprised if indigenous people who might be familiar with both (Polar bears and brown bears) did not have quite different words for the two subspecies.

Meet the Naskapi. Their word for Polar bear IS different from the word for brown bears. But … the Naskapi word for Polar bear (waapiskw) comes from the root for white (waap-). In other words, they’ve actually done exactly what I predicted: “which bear did you see?” “I saw a whitey.”

But David M. objects “aware of white bears, in southern Sweden?”
Polar bear fossils from the Younger Dryas have been found not far from Copenhagen, and the researcher who summarized the evidence for a southerly range suggests these conditions persisted through 10K bp. A long time before any IE incursions. But how long Polar Bears may have lasted in the northern Baltic, where sea ice is still an annual occurrence, I don’t know. There are polar bears in similar habitats in Canada today. But that’s idle speculation. The reality is that in the 800s Vikings are attested receiving polar bear pelts from the Sami as tribute and selling them south. There’s no reason to think the trade, or for that matter, the suzerainty, had just begun then. Polar bear skins would have been an extraordinary luxury good. So yeah, I think people were aware.

In the middle ages, captured bears themselves were brought south!!

Trond, in relation to beaver, you suggest if not *bher = carry, we would have to postulate a homonym. Did you read the beaver blogpost? The etymologist in question concedes two homonyms, one of which is in the semantic field for cutting. Not sawing or chopping, but engraving is within the semantic range.

When you’re in beaver habitat, you see far more beaver sticks than beavers. If you pick one up, you’ll see it’s absolutely covered with teeth-marks — engravings.

There are, of course, two other important avenues that weren’t explored. First, beaver skins would have been an amazingly important item of trade — one medieval text suggests they were worth 15 wolf pelts or 5 marten pelts.. And they would have been something which the Yamnaya or the Corded Ware folks or whoever would have obtained the way the British did in North America – buying them from hunters who probably weren’t IE speakers. The assumption that beaver must be derived from an Indo-European root is not a strong one.

Second, beaver may have been a visual description. Someone will retort “But he did explore that idea … he pointed out that in older Germanic sources, bruna didn’t even mean brown. It meant swarthy, and also shiny and bright, as with metal items.” But whoever makes that retort is someone who doesn’t see beaver very often. If you do, you think – swarthy and shiny with a color that might be brown but might not? yep, that’s be a beaver. To arrive at “Bruna didn’t mean brown, it meant swarthy and shiny” and think you’ve excluded a beaver suggests you don’t know beaver.

I doubt that the name comes from a visual desciptor. My point is just that knowledge of the thing itself is awfully useful in thinking about derivations.

I own a canoe rental business. I’ve spent a surprising amount of time observing beavers, thinking about what is interesting and distinctive about them in order to amuse our customers. It would never occur to me to describe the beaver with any of the nouns the distinguished etymologist offers – not the piler, the heaper, the collector, the carrier, the dragger, the toter. None of those are interesting features of beavers. The builder, the sawyer, possibly the plugger, since it’s plugging holes in their dams that actually make them look busy; maybe, just maybe, the etcher or engraver, if I lived in a culture where the skill of engraving was prized, and looking for an avatar of that skill.

The heaper? The collector? Honestly, I have trouble even acknowledging that as a serious effort.

But how long Polar Bears may have lasted in the northern Baltic, where sea ice is still an annual occurrence, I don’t know. There are polar bears in similar habitats in Canada today.

Really? Because the northern Baltic is almost freshwater. The diversity of marine animals there is way low. Are there even enough seals for a population of polar bears?

But that’s idle speculation. The reality is that in the 800s Vikings are attested receiving polar bear pelts from the Sami as tribute and selling them south. There’s no reason to think the trade, or for that matter, the suzerainty, had just begun then. Polar bear skins would have been an extraordinary luxury good. So yeah, I think people were aware.

But the skins, let alone the rest, of polar bears were much too rare to necessitate specifying the default bear as “brown” or “dark”.

Trond, in relation to beaver, you suggest if not *bher = carry, we would have to postulate a homonym. Did you read the beaver blogpost? The etymologist in question concedes two homonyms, one of which is in the semantic field for cutting. Not sawing or chopping, but engraving is within the semantic range.

When you’re in beaver habitat, you see far more beaver sticks than beavers. If you pick one up, you’ll see it’s absolutely covered with teeth-marks — engravings.

That particular beaver blogpost, one out of several in a series, is this one. It says:

But wait a moment: *bʰé-bʰr-o- and *bʰi-bʰr-ú- look exactly like the reconstructed variants of the ‘beaver’ word. If beavers owe their Indo-European name not to their coat colour but to some characteristic habitual activity, the verb describing that activity should be similar to *bʰer- ‘carry’. There are, for example, a couple of known roots of the shape *bʰerH-, one meaning ‘cut, strike, pierce, fight’ (with an unspecified laryngeal) and the other ‘move rapidly, rush, chase’ (in which *H = *h₂ or *h₃). The laryngeal would have been lost in a reduplication containing the root in zero-grade, so we would not be able to see any difference between the outcomes of *-bʰr- and *-bʰrH-.

Stretching the imagination a little, one would be able to connect the meaning of any of these roots with the beaver’s habits. For example, the first *bʰerH- is glossed ‘mit s[c]harfem Werkzeug bearbeiten’[footnote 7] in the LIV; and what are the beaver’s incisors if not “ein s[c]harfes Werkzeug”?

Footnote 7 is:

That is, ‘work on (something) with a sharp tool’ – a bit conjecturally, to be sure, since most of the attested meanings suggest the use of a weapon rather than a carpenter’s tool, or are figurative: ‘scold, rebuke’, etc.

And then in the author’s first comment (this isn’t YouTube – always read the comments!):

I’m torn between what you expected [*bʰerH- ‘to handle with a sharp tool’] and good old *bʰer-, but looking at the data I don’t see much evidence for this “sharp tool” thing (and if there’s any, the tools are those for drilling, boring or piercing rather than chisels). It’s certainly a possibility, and would be my second choice at the moment.

So, while “cutting ~ engraving” is certainly attractive, interpreting any of the available *bʰer(H)- roots as meaning that is a bit of a stretch. That leaves “carry”, reduplicated to “collect”, as the next best hypothesis.

First, beaver skins would have been an amazingly important item of trade — one medieval text suggests they were worth 15 wolf pelts or 5 marten pelts.. And they would have been something which the Yamnaya or the Corded Ware folks or whoever would have obtained the way the British did in North America – buying them from hunters who probably weren’t IE speakers. The assumption that beaver must be derived from an Indo-European root is not a strong one.

Why? Beavers are native to the whole range of Yamnaya & Corded Ware. And if the word isn’t IE, why does it fit IE morphology so well?

What are Uralic “beaver” words like?

If you do, you think – swarthy and shiny with a color that might be brown but might not? yep, that’s be a beaver. To arrive at “Bruna didn’t mean brown, it meant swarthy and shiny” and think you’ve excluded a beaver suggests you don’t know beaver.

Have you read that post (which isn’t the one I’m linking to, but the preceding one)? 🙂 One of its points is that brown is a Germanic word that doesn’t have any identified cognates outside of Germanic, very much unlike beaver.

The heaper? The collector? Honestly, I have trouble even acknowledging that as a serious effort.

Collecting stuff and heaping it up is unique to beavers and ants in Europe. It’s a rather conspicuous feature.

“Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from the animals!… Except the weasels.”
– Homer Simpson

What are Uralic “beaver” words like?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/majava

Wow! Thanks.

majava [from FPrm *maya. Cf. Kar majaj, Lap madjit] : beaver

and two lines up:

maja [from Bal. Cf. Est maja (house), Ltv maja] : hut

Chance resemblance?

ryan: But how long Polar Bears may have lasted in the northern Baltic, where sea ice is still an annual occurrence, I don’t know. There are polar bears in similar habitats in Canada today.

David M.: Really? Because the northern Baltic is almost freshwater. The diversity of marine animals there is way low. Are there even enough seals for a population of polar bears?

There are viable populations of seals in the Baltic. There are even small populations of ringed seals in Ladoga and in the Finnish lake system. Before modern human activity these could well have supported a population of polar bears.*) The same could probably be said of the White Sea. Maybe the large mammal predator was an early victim when human activity increased. But (arguing from ignorance) there are no archaeological traces of post Ice Age polar bears from the Baltic. I would guess that the limiting factor is summer temperatures. The polar bear is not built for temperatures staying much above 0°C for long periods of time.

ryan: But that’s idle speculation. The reality is that in the 800s Vikings are attested receiving polar bear pelts from the Sami as tribute and selling them south. There’s no reason to think the trade, or for that matter, the suzerainty, had just begun then. Polar bear skins would have been an extraordinary luxury good. So yeah, I think people were aware.

David M.: But the skins, let alone the rest, of polar bears were much too rare to necessitate specifying the default bear as “brown” or “dark”.

The polar bear was clearly known in Medieval Norway. There may have been one arriving on a drifting iceberg on the Finnmark coast every other generation, and even before the discovery of Greenland it may have been occasionally traded from the regions east of the White Sea, but it was too rare for any regular payment of Finnskatt tribute in skins of polar bears. Regular brown bears would be ubiquitous in the forests and along the fishing rivers of modern day Finnmark and the Kola Peninsula.

*) After all, Baltic marine mammals are said to have supported the Pitted Ware Culture, a late blooming mesolithic culture resisting, even pushing back against, and coexisting with incoming neolitihic farmers.

The polar bear is not built for temperatures staying much above 0°C for long periods of time.

And yet Gus the Polar Bear lived with his partners Lily and Ida in the Central Park Zoo here in NYC for more than twenty years in a habitat that included a tank of fresh water kept close to ambient outdoor temperature, ranging from 7 to 45 C, though he had an air-conditioned den on the worst days. Granted, Gus was a bit neurotic, but what New Yorker isn’t? (He was eventually treated with Prozac when he became seriously depressed.)

You wouldn’t expect to find a large semi-aquatic tropical mammal up in polar bear country either, but you do.

The etymological dictionary that juha linked to and I quoted says

maja [from Bal. Cf. Est maja (house), Ltv maja] : hut

But no reference to the reconstructed Baltic form. Without a further etymology it could just as well have been borrowed the other way.

If the “hut” word is an old Baltic loan, a distribution in Finnic and Mordvinic is as expected. The Permic word for beaver could (as the Sami) have spread through fur trade. The buyer’s word tend to wander upstream.

paja – vaja – maja is too good to be true!

45 C

I hope you mean 35?

My fingers were misaligned: the temperature range was 7 to 23 C. Still warmer than the Baltic.

Piotr, what do you think of the idea (due to Kortlandt) that the initial u- of ursus can be explained through analogy with urcāre ‘to roar’?

>Collecting stuff and heaping it up is unique to beavers and ants in Europe. It’s a rather conspicuous feature.

Eurasian cranes nests would be found in the same wetlands. Many large wetland birds heap mud and grasses.

Regardless, the word is just inapt for what beavers do. Most people don’t think of heaps as hollow with a living place inside. A beaver lodge is more wigwam than pile of stuff. That’s why no one calls them beaver-heaps. They’re called lodges or dens. I just don’t think any of the proffered meanings (and it was quite a shotgun approach – “it must have been *berh, though I have no idea which of the dozen wide-ranging meanings of *berh it derived from”) … none of those meanings make much sense to me as someone who has paid a lot of attention to wildlife.

>More on cast(o)ronyms in Uralic, Hungarian and Mansi have a root *kuNt-, borrowed at a very old time from Turkic

Gah! At the risk of raising an etymology that’s delicate to the point of offensive, that’s exactly where my googling of beaver pile led me.

>On the Norwegian coast less so, and in the shallow waters of the Baltic the water temperature often exceeds 20°C in summer.

Perhaps, but I’m talking about the Gulf of Bothnia, where temps don’t get above 14 C. And that’s today. We’re presumably talking about the time when IE came to the Baltic, on the order of 5,000 years BP. How did the currents flow, if Doggerland was perhaps not yet sunk to current Dogger Banks levels? I’m not sure we know what Baltic water temps would have been. Maybe we do, and maybe the answer is warmer than today, for all I know.

The skeletal remains of the south Swedish bear were just found recently, in a fairly well peopled area that must get much more attention than the northern Baltic. We would expect that polar bears were there at SOME point since the last glacial maximum, no? So the failure to find remains may have more to do with the infrequency of investigations.

On beaver: I do think your observation of the life of beavers is relevant. But the linguistic deduction is also solid. So how do we reconcile the differences? The frequentive/iterative things beavers are known for are 1) piling and building, 2) gnawing and felling trees, and 3) (by extension) being restless or industrious. I imagined the latter. The name wouldn’t have to be derived from the unreduplicated root but could rather have been formed from the reduplicated verb, which had its own range of extended meanings. I’ve pointed out before that it could be the origin of Latin febris “fever” and ON bifra “shake”.

On polar bears: Well, actually, I did check the temperatures of the public beaches in the municipalities of Kalix and Haparanda, and several of them were measured to 20°C, or nearly so, last July. Granted, that’s the shallow waters on the sandy beaches, but that’s where a hot polar bear would go to catch seals too. It’s all shallow up there.

j: More on cast(o)ronyms in Uralic, Hungarian and Mansi have a root *kuNt-, borrowed at a very old time from Turkic — or, why not, vice versa.

ryan: Gah! At the risk of raising an etymology that’s delicate to the point of offensive, that’s exactly where my googling of beaver pile led me.

Just adding to the awe! And asking if this really has to be coincidental. Could the Proto-Ugric beaver be a wickerworker? There’s a Uralic word for birchbark basket, *konte, that survived almost unchanged into Finnish and Sami — and was borrowed into Scandinavian as kont “pouch made of birchbark or wicker”.

That’s more or less what I’ve been thinking. Of course Italy had its own bears and even aurochs (as opposed to elk, whose earliest Latin description we owe to Julius Caesar), but all these animals could still have been part of Germania’s exotic beast package.

By the way, importing elk so that they might be butchered in the Colosseum seems a crazy idea, but we know that the Romans did it.

When the ancestors of the Italici lived in Central Europe, there was no Germanic as we know it (that is, with Grimm’s and Verner’s laws, and all that jazz). The Romans did encounter Germanic tribes during Atta’s lifetime; they only didn’t quite realise that those marauding, fierce Northerners defeated by Gaius Marius in 101 BC were a separate linguistic group rather than Celts of a sort.

The only known word for ‘bear’ in an “indigenous” Balkan language (other than Greek) is Albanian ar ~ ari, but it doesn’t look like ursus.

It’s like Lucan’s Teutātēs for Gaulish Toutātis. The change of *eu > *ou was rather late in Proto-Celtic; perhaps it did not spread to all Continental dialects, or the Romans used an archaising substitution pattern inherited from an earlier period. Whatever the reason, the substitution was possible, so Teuton- is probably the Latin rendering of a Celticised version of Germanic *þeuðana- — apparently the same word as OE þeoden, Goth. þiudans, ON þjóðann ‘prince, lord’ — used as a self-congratulatory ethnonym.

SPQR = Sono porci, questi Romani.

>how did you drift to ‘heap’? The claim is ‘carry repeatedly/all the time’.

From the blog’s conclusion:
>we might expect *bʰé-bʰr̥ (of perhaps collective *bʰé-bʰōr) ‘the effect of continual collecting, a growing pile’. Like, say, a beaver’s construction – a dam or a lodge

But I can see how you’d be misled, since at different points, the blog seemed to attach the claim to a wide range of meanings of *berh. The shotgun approach. You found one meaning semi-convincing. Someone else might settle on a different one. Everyone comes away thinking “wow, what a perfect theory,” without even noticing that they’ve come up with mutually exclusive answers.

>Cranes are found rather in open areas.

You may need to explain that to this one.:
https://www.savingcranes.org/species-field-guide/eurasian-crane/

This Sandhill has nested directly on a beaver lodge.:
http://www.mccoy.army.mil/vtriad_online/08092002/Sandhill%20Cranes.htm

It’s of course possible that the word comes from an IE root with some other meaning than those thus far adduced. But Ockham’s razor doesn’t suggest we assume strange beliefs for ancient people, whether taboos for which we have no evidence (other than that other people have taboos), or that words may have had unattested shades of meaning that could distantly be connected with the actual characteristics of a given animal.

Ockham’s razor instead suggests that proto-IE simply included a word more or like *bhebhros = beaver that had nothing to do with the *behr verb. This sufficiently explains the origins of words in daughter languages without having to come up with some just so story about why beavers were known to the ancients as continual carriers or Constant Gardeners rather than lodge and dam builders or tree cutters.

Don’t most languages contain two syllables words unexplained by any of their own mono-syllabic roots, carried over from other languages or handed down from the muddy prehistory of their own development? Why would proto-IE have been such an impoverished language that it had no such?

The idea of *behr to beaver is an interesting thought experiment. But that’s really all it is.

If the Romans did borrow ursus, alcis, etc. from Germanic by the Late Republican period, then that complicates the linguistic situation in central Europe. Either Germanic languages predominated farther south than usually accepted, or Germanic languages were associated with living in forests where Celtic ones predominated in the towns, or– something.

Marja Erwin: Either Germanic languages predominated farther south than usually accepted, or Germanic languages were associated with living in forests where Celtic ones predominated in the towns, or– something.

Or the Germanic intrusion into Celtic areas north of the Alps was pioneered by traders from the Baltic, who also adapted Old Italic script to make the runic alphabet. The earliest runic inscriptions are dated to the 2nd century CE, but the letter forms and the fact that two Runic characters were used in the Greek-derived Gothic alphabet are evidence that the script is older.

It’s like Lucan’s Teutātēs for Gaulish Toutātis.

*facepalm* There I go quoting Asterix in Latin, when I knew full well that par Toutatis was translated as beim Teutates into German…

Sono porci, questi Romani.

Huh, I only knew the version with pazzi.

The earliest runic inscriptions are dated to the 2nd century CE

There’s one from about 50 CE where it’s not clear if the letters are Latin or runes.

Me: Could the Proto-Ugric beaver be a wickerworker? There’s a Uralic word for birchbark basket, *konte, that survived almost unchanged into Finnish and Sami

j.: This particular ‘basket’ word is (contra UEW) not an independent root, but a group of derivatives from *kanta- ‘to carry’.

So the Proto-Ugric beaver is a carrier?

Oh, and could this in some way be related to Germanic ‘hand’?

(Fi. kontti also looks like some kind of an internal loanword. Maybe first Samic *kuontēmē ‘carrying utility’ gets borrowed into Finnish, develops the more specific meaning ‘birch bark basket’, and then gets loaned back into S. with a new meaning and also new innovative /-ntt-/.)

Finnish phonology is remarkably conservative, but Sami is not, and I should have understood that this was too good to be true. Still borrowed into Scandinavian, though, in the meaning “birchbark purse”.

*kumtə ‘wide’ would be however a phonetically exact match — and the beaver has a wide tail indeed — but also: this might still have a hard time making into a top 5 of the most distinctive traits of beavers.

Some sort of back-formation from how it’s widening brooks? “Wide brook” -> “Beaver dam” -> “Beaver”. Or “fat”?

Here, except that it doesn’t actually say BP and might actually mean 11734 BP. Earlier versions featured a slightly different date and added “counting uncertainty 69 years”; the cited paper (open access) says 11650 BP “with a maximum counting error of 99 yr”, the counted objects being ice layers; I don’t know where the steady improvement comes from.

That one was really fast, with the Gulf Stream evidently changing course from one year to the next. Ice ages begin very slowly and end abruptly.

It’s worth mentioning that there are a couple polar bear skeletal remains from the Goteberg area dated more than 1,000 years after the end of the Younger Dryas. That’s still millennia away from the arrival of any IE groups. But an extant population that long after the climate change suggests that something other than the southern limit of pack ice may constrict the current territory of polar bears.
This would be in keeping with Farley Mowat’s description of the species in North America. I’ll leave aside his discussion of polar bears in antiquity because it glibly covers things that people who give better citations seem to dismiss.
There’s also the fact that the northern Baltic seems to have been much deeper 5,000 years ago, in an early stage of ongoing post-glacial rebound. That would have kept summer surface water temperatures colder.
All of which leaves the possibility that the final extirpation at least from the northern Baltic happened when groups with bronze weapons began entering the region, likely speaking a form of or early descendant of proto-IE.
Though certainly it’s also possible they were locally extinct throughout the Baltic much earlier.

How would that explain ursus, alcis, and other Germanic loanwords into Middle or Late Republican Latin? Are bears and elk more strongly associated with the Baltic than with central Europe? Are these reaching Latin via sea instead of river trade?

I don’t know. I said “the Baltic” since it’s the other end of the conventionally named Amber Road and since we know that there were Germanic tribes living around its southwestern shores at the time. It wouldn’t have to be Germanic traders going all the way to Rome. By the early 2nd century BCE the Romans controlled the entire peninsula, the Po Valley, and the Adriatic. Roman traders would be venturing into the Alpine valleys and beyond, and Germanic traders could be eliminating the middle man from their end, meeting up in Alpine trading posts like Curia or the Danubian fords of Radobona or Vindobona. Would they cater for Roman demand by bringing cubs and calves of exotic animals as well as amber, iron and hides?

The First of May! The First of May!
Outdoor @*#$ing, impossible for the last twelve centuries, starts today!

ryan: All of which leaves the possibility that the final extirpation at least from the northern Baltic happened when groups with bronze weapons began entering the region, likely speaking a form of or early descendant of proto-IE.

I’ll grant you that, but I really think absence of evidence is evidence of absence here. There are quite large corpora of rock art from northern Fennoscandia, from both the Atlantic and the Baltic side, dating back some 7000 years. They show bears. Bear paws, long-legged bears, bears in dens. They show whales, seals and fish. But no bears that can reasonably be interpreted as polar bears, either from body shape or from being hunted by boat.

But it would be really cool if I were wrong about this. We can hope for the budding archaeology of the Baltic itself. Being brackish and cold and low on oxygene at the bottom, it has preserved sunken artifacts almost like the Black Sea. Fearing the effect of heating waters, there are now increased efforts to map and explore the seabed. Or at least talk of increased efforts.

j.: I second ryan’s complaint that IE-ists and overly well IE-read linguistics often seem obsessed with finding “roots”, even though full stem etymologies are strictly superior to root etymologies (they explain more phonetic material and require fewer ad hoc assumptions of semantic changes).

Point taken. I know I’m an amateur playing with roots, and especially when playing with Uralic, where I know too little about the the inner workings to venture into more detailed speculation. I’m just happy someone will play with me.

But I don’t think it applies to professional IE-ists — at least not in general. I’ve seen the dismissal “worthless root etymology” more than once in the literature. And in the case at hand, the etymology of beaver, Piotr’s derivation from a reduplicated root is just an accidental find on the way to the understanding of a whole derivational pattern, while the “brown” etymology is a bare root deduced from shared sounds in three Germanic words.

Yes, there’s surely another extreme as well, of dismissing all non-trivial morphology (or all non-trivial semantics, etc.). No particular critique at Piotr intended here either.

Professional IE-ists don’t seem to actively posit bare roots all over the place these days, I mean more that I haven’t really seen much critical engagement with the established traditional theory of strictly monosyllabic roots either.

Saint Valpurga

I just realized that this saint must be the one known in French as Sainte Gauburge, the patron of the village of the same name in Southern Normandy. The Germanic name sounds a lot better than the French adaptation, which sounds terrible.

— p.s. Wikipedia.fr says that the saint (an 8th century abbess) is also known as Sainte Valburge and the region is known (by some) as le Valburgeois. These alternate names sound modern, perhaps introduced because they sound better than the name of the town.

I suppose that the Scandinavian Saint Valpurga is associated with the German Walpurgisnacht, but how?

Are bears and elk more strongly associated with the Baltic than with central Europe?

Elks, as of the 20th century, occasionally show up in northern Austria and no further south. Bears are native to Italy and even to the Atlas mountains…

It’s worth mentioning that there are a couple polar bear skeletal remains from the Goteberg area dated more than 1,000 years after the end of the Younger Dryas. That’s still millennia away from the arrival of any IE groups. But an extant population that long after the climate change suggests that something other than the southern limit of pack ice may constrict the current territory of polar bears.

Oh, the Fennoscandian ice shield took several thousand years to melt completely. I should have remembered that. Still, by Corded Ware times, it was long gone.

when groups with bronze weapons began entering the region, likely speaking a form of or early descendant of proto-IE.

Bronze weapons actually reached the northern Baltic from the east, likely together with West Uralic, explaining why the people with the highest percentage of Yamnaya ancestry today are the Estonians.

One level of basic IE that could deserve more attention is the system of root extensions.

Oh yes. Somewhere on academia.edu there’s a draft that convincingly suggests meanings as derivational suffixes for several of them, but I forgot where.

However, all root extensions fit within the monosyllabic template. The unanalyzable di- or trisyllables that can be reconstructed are so few in number that they’ve long been suspected of being loanwords.

St. Walpurga was born about 710 AD in Devon (then already part of Wessex) as Wealdburg. Her brothers Willibald and Winibald (Wynnbald) also became saints. Their mother Winna (Wynne) was the sister of St. Boniface, whose real name was Winfred (Wynnfriþ). Their father is known as St. Richard the Pilgrim. His real name is unknown, but we can be pretty sure that it began with W (the runic-derived letter wynn).

By the way, the town of St. Boniface, Manitoba, was merged into the city of Winnipeg in 1971. The curse of the rune wynn is still upon the family.

David: Not so strange: see this google for “feast of the translation”.

David, John,

I wonder what happens is the relics of a saint are lost in translation.

Walpurgisnacht is indeed used to mean a witches’ sabbath

In German, too, in that such events were thought to occur during that particular night. Compare Halloween.

Or maybe Mayday was a good date for the village feast.

Likely.

My first encounter with the Walpurgisnacht was in Goethe’s Faust.

Trond: Maybe her celebration in a village in Normandy has as much to do with strengthening bonds across the channel after the Norman conquest of England

Her lifetime coincides approximately with the period of Norman raids into France, which ended after the king (a very weak one at the time) granted the raiders the territory which became the duchy of “Normandy”. Officially the Duke of Normandy was a vassal of the king of France, but he was de facto independent, and the Norman nobles maintained contact with their relatives on the other side of the Channel. The English royals at the time intermarried with “Danes” and Normans: William the Conqueror’s grandmother was the sister of the English king of his time, which is why he considered himself a legal pretender to the throne of England. So it is not surprising that a saintly “English” princess of probably mixed ancestry, remembered from the time of the foundation of Normandy, should have been venerated in a small Norman town even if she never set foot in it.

David M.: The unanalyzable di- or trisyllables that can be reconstructed are so few in number that they’ve long been suspected of being loanwords.

E. incidentally g. the “bear” word. But a language with no words except for a handful of borrowings that can’t be derived from monosyllabic roots, and which on top of that may have lacked phonemic vowels — what kind of process made it become like that? More than a natural language it looks like a conlang, or maybe a highly artificial register. Even if we allow for the inevitable incompleteness of reconstruction, what made only those features be recoverable?

Die kleine Hexe

*high-five*

may have lacked phonemic vowels

That claim comes from people who either don’t know what “phonemic” means or believe ablaut was spontaneously generated out of nothing and can be internally-reconstructed away. In anything accessible to the comparative method, *nokʷts “night” and *nekʷts “night’s” are a minimal pair for /o/ vs. /e/, which lands us at two phonemic vowels as found today in Abaza or Arrernte even if [i u] never contrasted with /j w/ and even if every single *a was /e/ next to *h₂.

With that out of the way…

But a language with no words except for a handful of borrowings that can’t be derived from monosyllabic roots […] — what kind of process made it become like that?

Good old reduction of unstressed syllables, I’d guess, not unlike the zero grade. Compare, if only as examples:
– Moscow School Proto-Altaic, where most roots were (C)VC(C)V and the second syllable distinguished all 5 vowel qualities (but not the 3 diphthongs if those weren’t just *j + vowel sequences), both tones, and possibly the somewhat dubious (i.e. more dubious than most of the rest) length, while stress wasn’t phonemic and can’t be reconstructed;
– Proto-Uralic, where most roots were again (C)VC(C)V, but the first syllable distinguished 8 vowels, while the second had a surface inventory of 3 or possibly 4, which amounts to 2 phonemes because of vowel harmony, and stress wasn’t phonemic but was very obviously initial;
– PIE, where almost all roots were (CC)CVC(C) outside of zero-grade and stress was phonemic.

Also, contact with West Caucasian (with its even shorter roots and just *2 vowels) could have played a role.

Why aren’t there borrowed verbs with their own paradigms, whether those be wholesale imports or patchwork solutions for fitting into the IE system?

Verbs are generally harder to borrow than nouns. Navajo had to innovate a construction with an auxiliary verb to do that (within the last few decades).

But who knows? Maybe some PIE verb roots really have to be reconstructed with *a or (shudder) *b; those would be prime candidates for identifiable borrowings. Maybe some CVC roots are borrowed from West Caucasian C roots plus a prefix or two. Maybe some others are borrowed from Pre-Uralic (or whatever) CVCV roots, with the final vowel reanalyzed as part of a suffix or as epenthetic. Perhaps this goes even further, and the “thematic verbs” are inspired by a bunch of borrowed CVCV roots. It’s not hard to speculate.

I have actually seen people claiming that the reconstructed language corresponds to a single unitary stage in the development of the IE language family,

It does – if it’s done right. Because it took so long to figure out where exactly Anatolian and Tocharian go in the tree, and because the relationships of the other branches to each other mostly still aren’t understood, plenty of things that are commonly reconstructed for PIE are not PIE at all (from slide 22 on).

and that what we can see was all there was.

That, on the other hand, is right next to impossible.

and that what we can see was all there was.

That, on the other hand, is right next to impossible.

And all that he could see, and all that he could see, was the other side of the mountain …

Since we have come around to “The Bear Went Over the Mountain,” I have a question that has bugged me from childhood. I first learned the song with the bear lyrics and then some horrible alternate ones about Cub Scouts. However, I also stumbled across another version among my mother’s old piano sheet music. Among the songs she learned when she was a kid in 1950s Connecticut, was “The Cat Went Over the Catskills,” with the same tune as the bear song.

The cat went over the Catskills.
The cat went over the Catskills.
The cat went over the Catskills,
With all the skill of a cat.

At the time, I figured this was just an alternative set of lyrics, such as folk songs often have. It would make more sense for it to have been common in the Northeast than out in Michigan or Oregon where I had lived up to that time. I have sung it on occasion though, and nobody has ever recognized it (except my mother).

In fact, I just Googled it, and the only online references to the song name that Google finds are directly to the Schaum duet sheet music or to old recital announcements in newspapers, stating what pairs of children played the song as their performance piece.

So has anybody else heard of these lyrics, or were they just invented for a known tune by the Schaum music publishers?

Marlborough s’en va-t-en guerre ‘Marlborough is going to war’

This song about the death and funeral of the Duke of Marlborough is a humorous one, since the Duke was not killed in the famous battle between French and English troops, although he was defeated.

In French the name is pronounced as if written Malbrou (my tradition) or Malbrouk.

Several versions of the song lyrics are on the internet, starting identically but becoming more and more absurd as performers often added ludicrous verses of their own composition, some of which have survived.

The wording is meant to suggest a medieval song. The phrase s’en va-t-en guerre is both archaic and substandard: the modern standard would be s’en va à la guerreor more commonly part à la guerre. The inserted -t- also suggests an uneducated pronunciation (adding a “false liaison”, as does also the z of Il reviendra z’ à Pâques). The second line Ne sait quand reviendra ‘Doesn’t know when (he) will come back’, with its omission of the subject pronouns, is a deliberate medievalism, perhaps copying a typical line in old songs with the similar theme of the lady in her tower watching anxiously for news of her husband.

As for the “Arabic tune brought back from the Crusades”, it is laughable in this particular case, but the general theme of the lonely lady pining for her absent husband may have become especially popular during that time. The tune, however, is neither Arabic nor sad.

a close approximation to something that some actual group of people spoke at a some actual point in time

Again, if a reconstruction is done right, that’s what it is, except that some things are inevitably missing because they happen to be lost in all attested descendants.

The words in the play have nothing to do with the popular text however — but I forgot to say that the play gives Marlbroug s’en va-t-en guerre as the name of the melody.

Perhaps this goes even further, and the “thematic verbs” are inspired by a bunch of borrowed CVCV roots. It’s not hard to speculate.

This comes actually close to the kind of thing I was hinting at. If it was the kind of work I’m getting paid for, I would probably be investigating hypotheses such as that maybe the lack of thematic inflection in Anatolian is actually a phonological isogloss (plain old syncope under some particular conditions) and not a primarily morphological one. To quote something I wrote on an Academia.edu session just a few days ago: the widely-attested historical trajectory in root structure is vowel stems → thematic stems → consonant stems → shorter vowel stems → etc.; and not anything involving massive parallel vowel epentheses all over the place.

There is a thematic inflection in Hittite – e. g. both the type with zero grade in the root and the type -ske/o- are attested. What isn’t attested is the type with full (e) grade in the root, type bhere/o- , that becomes the most frequent type in the other IE languages, but is IIRC still rare in Tocharian.
The idea that the thematic inflection derives from the perfect/medium system is around since at least the 60s; there is a huge discussion about the exact pathways and the structural reasons for the development.

I hardly know why you would want to talk about foxes in a brewhouse at all, but so it goes. The game of able-whackets, which is both a card game (the rules of which have not been preserved) and a language game in a more formal sense than usual.

Current xkcd pokes that bear.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_true_name_of_the_bear.png

Arth struck me as a rather odd reconstruction too; surely syllabic r wouldn’t result in ar in Germanic?

Surprising given Randall Monroe’s general carefulness. Did he actually get the form from Gretchen McCulloch?

On the other hand, the bear’s reaction seems to validate the form. Perhaps it’s really a Welsh bear.

@David Eddyshaw: Randall’s not actually that careful. However, I would assume in this case, the he got “arth” straight from Gretchen McCulloch; he tends not to misstate the conclusions of the sources he utilizes—merely to overestimate their expertise. In McCulloch’s case, there does not seem to be any particular evidence from her online writing that she has any particular knowledge of historical phonology (or historical linguistics more generally; her M.A. thesis appears to be purely about verb grammar in Mi’gmaq Algonquian). She was probably just carelessly repeating something else she had heard on the Internet.

Anyway, if Avestan rašah and Sanskrit rákṣas ‘harm, injury, damage’ are indeed cognates, then *h₂ŕ̥tḱos isn’t primitive either: it means something like ‘destroyer’. In which case the true and real IE name of the bear is lost forever.

Except to the bear.

@John Cowan: It could go the other way. The Indo-Iranian words might mean “bear stuff,” as a kenning or perhaps even as a taboo replacement for the original word for “harm.” (I think that would be interesting, particularly since traditional depictions if the demoic rakshasa are rarely bear like.)

Aren’t all animal names ultimately descriptive?

A great many people names are. I discovered a while back that Kusaal human-reference nouns have the property that they can be used as adjectives modifying other nouns describing people (e.g man/male; deaf-person/deaf); no other Kusaal nouns can be used as adjectives, and Kusaal adjectives cannot otherwise head NPs (except in very restricted circumstances.) Eventually it dawned on me that for semantic reasons there aren’t that many different sorts of noun describing people anyway: proper names (including ethnonyms etc); kinship words; agent nouns and the like; and pretty much everything else is a description. Are we not all adjectives, at the end of the day?

I should have been clearer: by “people names” I meant “nouns referring to people”; proper names are obviously a highly important subgroup of them, but I was thinking particularly of those person-referring nouns that aren’t proper nouns or kinship terms.

Kusaal does the whole-sentence personal name thing a bit; for example Amoryam “Has intelligence” (borne by a girl, naturally.) Yoruba does it all the time.

No relation to our colleague besides strange fascination with the spring Communist festival.

This particular part of my online nick derives from the metro station, though the station is indeed named for the Communist festival.

@David Marjanović: You are right that what I suggested is not very likely. However, at the time depth involved (early PIE or earlier), I don’t think it’s impossible.

The usual Indo-European system, for what it’s worth, is a bipartite name of the “Vladi-slav” variety, where both individual roots are (usually) meaningful, but the combination is very often meaningless
My understanding is that the meaninglessness increased over time in the individual languages, by processes like giving children names where one compound element of the father’s name was combined with a second element independent on whether the combination made sense. When Germanic names become attested, the only requirement that seems to be there is that male names have to have as second element a (grammatically) male noun, while for female names a female noun is required.

You’re surely not suggesting that the word in that context implies intelligence.

No, indeed.

**Elbenschein?

Elbenschön. Chasing the etymology chain in Wikt from schön gives “From Pre-Germanic *skowh₁nis, a verbal adjective originally meaning ‘watchable’, derived from a lost strong verb *skawaną, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kewh₁- ‘perceive, pay attention’.

I note that one Juliane Angelina Biallas uses the name @elbenschein on Instagram, which accounts for the first few ghits. Most of the others (there are 2,640 of them) that I examined are direct references to the L.R., where it is apparently the standard translation of the epithet Elfsheen. Evidently the German translator(s) did not realize that Tolkien was modernizing an archaic name (as he did with Shadowfax and Wormtongue) rather than actually translating it. There is another Morwen, Théoden’s wife, whose by-name is Steelsheen, probably given to her by the Rohirrim, who distrusted elves but had a thing for swords.

I note with amusement that elbisch can be either ‘Elvish’ or ‘Elbian, pertaining to the Elbe River’.

(Last time I checked, “sildenafil citrate” did not trigger any spam trapping, probably because no-one ever marketed it with that name)

Old Georgian vepxi > Georgian vepxvi? Why would it do that?

Viagra is perfectly cromulent girl’s name. Sildenafil is a character from LOTR.

Another link from McCulloch’s Twitter was this thread collection of animal taboos by Rory Turnbull. There are different replies to the main thread, but that one has, at the end, the following claim:

In modern Russia even the (sur)name ‘medved’ (honey-wise one) is never pronounced in the places where you can meet them. Locals call him ‘him’: ‘his footprints’ etc

I have never heard of a modern Russian bear taboo. ¹ Is it possible that such a taboo still exists among modern Russian-speakers?

I did find this work — [The Bear Taboo in Even Language and Folklore, by Alexandr A. Petrov. 1989. ] — but that does not seem to be widely held, and of course, is not actually Russian.

Besides the general name for bear, nakat, there are many names which are taboo in different dialects.
    The names can be divided into the following groups:
    1. Names based on kinship: a) male (father): Abaga; abanap; arnica ; amican; dedusla, amana grandfather; eticen old man; etce , atea father-in-law; b) female (mother): Ata, grandmother, aunt; atican, old woman; upe, grandmother, aunt.
    2. Names based on fear of the bear: nelene, neluce, dreadful, nugde ; nugdece ; nugdene, dark object; henun, terrible; ellanja, dark; hutfana, devil; memeke, dreadful; agdi, agdiri, thunder, thunderstorm storm.
    3. Names based on the physical features and typical actions of bears: kabalan, crackle, crash; higemme, skinner; debere, shaggy, fluffy; dericen, evasive, running away.

    It is interesting to note that the taboo is also applied to bear cubs – e.g., ‘kunakari‘ is the word for ‘one-year-old bear cub’. It also means ‘baby’, ‘boy’, or ‘doll’.

=______________________________________________________
1: I remember the “black hare/black cat” superstition being discussed here, though.

Wikipedia’s “page” for “Taboo deformation” is actually a link to “Euphemism”, and doesn’t even mention bears. There are also pages for “Taboo on the dead” (words that even sound like the names of the dead are avoided) , and “Naming taboo” (exalted personages in historical China and neighboring countries Korea, Vietnam, and Japan could not be referred to by their name, and characters used in writing their names had to be changed, eliminated, or written with missing strokes). No animal naming taboo information.

Yes, there was (maybe still exists) such superstition among rural Russians who live in forest areas. This is mentioned in numerous nature, hunting and travel books.

Interesting.

I wonder if it would be reasonable to conclude that this has persisted for tens of thousands of years, since the diversification of PIE into its multiple child languages. Or do superstitions fade out and spontaneously revive?

The fate of *tḱ medially in Germanic is unfortunately highly obscure. Certainly of all the possible outcomes, probably the one least worth considering (because of a total lack of any evidence or suggestive hints) is simplification to *t (> *þ).

More commonly seen in discussions, but still probably unlikely, is simplification to *ḱ > Germanic *h (= /x/). This is what a modern reconstruction like *urrow assumes (PGmc *urhaz). This is based, essentially, on an inappropriate overgeneralization from initial position to medial. Initially, we have words in Germanic that seem to show simplification of things like *dʰǵʰ- to *ǵʰ- (guma, gumi ‘human, person’ is probably the most famous of these, though in some case forms the cluster was probably even heavier, *dʰǵʰm-). But this is not very useful for understanding medial clusters. A syllable onset with two stops is very heavy, against sonority sequencing, and would have to be simplified under later, Proto-Germanic phonotactics. On the other hand, a medial cluster was probably split between two syllables: *h₂ŕ̥t.kos would be really pretty vanilla in terms of syllable structure. Sequences of two medial stops are common in Germanic, and usually turn into a fricative-stop sequence — most examples have the second element *t. (There are some quirks — dental-dental sequences become *ss.) So there’s no actually relevant positive evidence for assuming medial deletion, and everything we see about early Germanic phonotactics and sound changes otherwise speaks against there being any motivation for cluster simplification.

So what did happen to it? That’s basically unknown. The ‘best’ evidence is from Norse þexla, Old High German dehsala, which has been derived from *tetḱ-tlo-. But even if this is right (and the details of the morphological formation aren’t certain), this is extra complicated, with the sequence *tḱt involved. It doesn’t help much. Worse evidence still comes from a new personal names like Norse Yrsa, which features in a family full of people with ursine names. If this goes back to Proto-Germanic, it could be reconstructed as either *ursijōn- (which doesn’t seem very likely as an outcome of *tḱ) or *urhsijōn-. If the latter is correct, it could suggest a Greek-like metathesis, combined with earlier assibilation of *t before another stop: *tḱ > *tsḱ > *ḱts > *ḱs, which then develops by well established changes to *hs. But this name might come from Latin ursus instead, and even if it doesn’t, its exact origin and formation are uncertain (is the -s- really part of the original base, or a later suffix?).

So this leaves speculation on general grounds, which is always iffy, and decidedly undecided here. One big question is whether we should expect metathesis or not (with or without some kind of assibilation, i.e. to *ḱts or to *ḱt). Metathesis of velar-dental stop sequences is well attested only in Greek, with one probably early Celtic example. Ringe overapplies cladistic reasoning to conclude that this change must go back to their common ancestor, some kind of ‘late’ or ‘inner’ IE which would take in most branches aside from Anatolian and Tocharian. The problem is that this could just as well be taken as evidence that metathesis here is repeatable and independently recurring (velar-dental is a vastly more frequent stop combination in early IE than dental-velar). So this really doesn’t help us much with Germanic. The inference that it _must_ have occurred in Inner IE is clearly going way beyond the evidence, but if the change is moderately natural and repeatable, then it could have taken place in Germanic too (but didn’t have to).

So the options are either 1) that original *tḱ was preserved, and the segments underwent sound changes but stuck around and in that order; 2) that *tḱ metathesized, and developed from there; or 3) that one (or in theory both, though that’s unlikely) of the segments was deleted. Cross-cutting this is the possibility of some kind of assibilation or palatalization of the *t. I think that gives the following seven possible outcomes (as well *∅):

A) *tḱ > ??
B) *tsḱ > *sk
C) *ḱt > *ht
D) *ḱts > *hs
[E) *t > *þ]
[F) *ts > *s]
[G) *ḱ > *h]

There is, again, no evidence for the kinds of deletion found in E-G, I just included them for the sake of showing all the logical possibilities. Whether AB or CD is more plausible depends on your views on metathesis, and whether AC or BD is better depends on your views of potential assibiliation of *t (which is only really secure for *TT clusters).

I’m personally skeptical about metathesis, and agnostic about assibiliation. So I’d favour A or B. But what would A have become later on? Mechanically applying sound changes might point to *þk, but this would be unique cluster in Proto-Germanic, and I’m not entirely sure it wouldn’t have merged with the much more common *sk. This *sk is also what we’d definitely get from B. Either way would result in PGmc *urskaz, probably modern English *orsh (though something like *orx would be a dialectal possibility). I don’t know what an early *urþkaz would do — that’s just too unparalleled (would it really end up as *orthc?).

At any rate, different assumptions will lead to different reconstructions, and uncertainties abound — but _arth_, at least, can be easily ruled out.

On another forum, i came across *rast as a reconstruction of what the bear would have been known as in Croatian, had the PIE word survived.

Old Georgian vepxi > Georgian vepxvi? Why would it do that?

Georgians love their complex onsets so much that if they inherit one that seems too simple, they add random extra consonants to big it up. What else can account for monosyllables like ɡvbrdɣvnis ‘he is plucking us’?

I hadn’t seen it as a noun, though

Well, perhaps the proper name Alfsciene < a zero-nominalization of the adjective ad hoc without alfsciene ever being used as a common noun. I tried to find such adjectival names in German without success. However, TIL that the name Bartholdy, as in the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, has a Latin genitive ending. In this case it refers to Barthold, a property in Luisenstadt, Berlin which his mother’s brother owned, the idea being to give the Christian son of a Jewish converso a decidedly non-Jewish name.

That led me to think of Beethoven, and I looked around a bit. Apparently his surname means ‘from Bettenhoven’, a (former) municipality in the province of Liege now usually called Bettincourt. Beets again, perhaps, but it may simply have to do with a farm owned by some family named Betto.

But what is strange is that though Beethoven’s grandfather was definitely named Lodewijk/Ludwig van Beethoven[*] and moved from the province of Antwerp to Bonn in 1733, it is quite unclear which Lodewijk he actually was. Two of that name, distant relatives, were born in 1712, one in Mechelen and one in Antwerp city. Mechelen claims him today and most historians agree, but actual genealogical evidence is lacking.

[*] nl.WP says: “In het doopregister is Van Beethoven ingeschreven als Ludovicus. Gedurende zijn leven werd zijn voornaam geschreven als Lodewyk, Lodewyck, Lodewijck, Lodewijk, Louis en Ludwig”. This also shows that the grandfather, though not the far more famous grandson, is called “Van Beethoven” in Dutch in a surname-only context.

Either way would result in PGmc *urskaz, probably modern English *orsh (though something like *orx would be a dialectal possibility).

Hm, orc? Orcus?

David Marjanović, 2018: the bear can hardly be the brown one because the very concept of “brown” is just a few hundred years old

Shouldn’t that be phrased more precisely as: the lexeme “brown” didn’t arrive at its current range as a color term until a few hundred years ago? It’s not like Old English didn’t have words for brownish colors, e.g. fallow, eorp, dun. At least the first two, and possibly the third, go back to Proto-Germanic. At that time, PGmc *brūnaz may have meant today’s “brown”, or “shiny, polished” as in burnish (via French from Frankish), or both, depending on which reference you look at.

brūn occurs three times in Beowulf, and early translators translated it as “brown”; I’m not sure whether they just didn’t know that it could mean “shiny” in Old English, or they did know and thought that the old sense was still viable. In 1909, Francis B. Gummere had Grendel’s mother wield a “brown-edged” sword, but he also thought it needed a footnote: “This brown of swords, evidently meaning burnished, bright, continues to be a favorite adjective in the popular ballads.” Well, it’s true that archaic ballads were all the rage in Victorian times, and some of them included “brown swords”, but by 1903 the ballad editors were also footnoting it. (Gummere’s translation is archaizing, but it still sounds good enough: the first time I got all the way through Beowulf was listening to his version on a podcast. But that brown sword threw me out of the story—I was wondering if it was covered in dried blood, or mud.)

Who came up with this bear=brown=*bʰer- equation, and when? 19th century?

Shouldn’t that be phrased more precisely as: the lexeme “brown” didn’t arrive at its current range as a color term until a few hundred years ago?

It’s not just that, but there wasn’t a word for that range. The ones you mention (and tan and buff) don’t cover the whole range, and some or all extend beyond it.

19th century?

Sure.

The Chinese just call brown dark yellow, and call blue green (or maybe they call green blue). That’s because Chinese is an uninflected SVO isolating language, see?

Ancient bronze swords turning up are green

Even if tossed into an anoxic environment like a peat bog?

While there were bronze items in this bog, I don’t see a bronze sword specifically. I also don’t know if cleaning/preparing might have removed any green oxide layer, although it seems at least plausible that the items were found without such because bog.

[Bog preserve us]

A translation question: The English on the page says:

The offerings in Vimose intensified nearly 2000 years ago. In the period immediately before the birth of Christ the local farmers sacrificed pots, food and animals. Often the animal was dismembered and only selected parts thrown to a pole.

However, the Danish version says:

Ofringerne i Vimose tog til i mængde for lidt over 2000 år siden. I tiden umiddelbart før Kristi fødsel ofrede de lokale bønder lerkar, fødevarer og dyr. Tit blev dyret parteret og kun udvalgte dele tøjret til en pæl.

Which Google translates as:

The sacrifices in Vimose increased in quantity a little over 2000 years ago. In the time immediately before the birth of Christ, the local farmers sacrificed pottery, food, and animals. Often the animal was parted and only selected parts were tethered to a pole.

(And presumably, the pole and parts were tossed together into the bog)

Does anyone have an idea how “tethered to a pole” could have become “thrown to a pole”? I would figure that someone fluent enough in English to use “dismembered” rather than “parted” would have seen that “thrown” was wrong, but there it is. Maybe it’s just a brain fart, but maybe there’s something else going on?

There are stories of bear-cubs being kept as pets by Norsemen. Brown bears often domesticated and were even imported into Iceland as pets where they were known as “house bears.” Apparently the importation of brown bears into Iceland was later stopped because they became such a nuisance. Owners of bears were liable to large financial penalties their pets injured people or damaged property.

https://www.academia.edu/2281595/Audun_and_the_Polar_Bear

Some Tofalar taboo deformations (in Russian):

Например, до нас дошли некоторые тофаларские эвфемизмы для упоминания медведя: ирезаң (ире — «дедушка» + аң — «зверь»), чер өғлүғ аң (букв. «зверь с земляным домом»), ире (букв. «предок, прадед») и энэ (букв. «прабабка»), қузуқтаар (букв. «шишкующий», от глагола қузуқта — «добывать кедровые шишки, шишковать»). Части тела медведя тоже принято называть иносказательно: его шкура — это чоорhан (букв. «теплое одеяло»), сердце — дiсiлəəш (от глагола дiсiлə — «биться») и так далее. Действия, связанные с медвежьей охотой, также табуированы и носят эвфемистические названия: например, булут тыърт (букв. «тянуть облака») означает «собирать народ, чтобы идти совместно добывать медведя»; сөлтөңне (букв. «выжить из ума от старости») значит «найти медвежью берлогу».

Челер аң (букв. «рысящий зверь»), қудуруқтуғ (букв. «хвостатый») и дағ ҷыдыы (букв. «горная собака») — все это эвфемизмы для запрещенного наименования волка — бөрү. Соболя называли чараҷаң (букв. «маленький зверь») или алды (букв. «добыча»). Кабарга — один из основных промысловых зверей для коренного населения Тофаларии — получила прозвища азығлығ (букв. «клыкастый») и шубараш (букв. «пестрая пища»). Змею называли дағ балыы (букв. «горная рыба»), изюбря — сарығ-аң (букв. «желтый зверь»), а лося — улуғ-аң (букв. «большой зверь»).

https://postnauka.ru/longreads/156073

Даже к финским скалам бурым …

https://1mim.livejournal.com/574988.html

there wasn’t a word for that range — If a word doesn’t match the boundaries of modern “brown” exactly, why should that disqualify it from describing a bear?

No, the claim is that brown wasn’t a color term at all, meaning instead “dark and shiny”.

On the cognates, here’s something from the source I cited in this thread long ago: “As late as the seventeenth century, German braun could still refer to hues in the violet/purple range (e.g. the colour of the amethyst).”

бурый is interesting, thanks. Russian Wiktionary provides etymology from Vasmer, who says it’s borrowed from Turkic. Turkish boz covers both brown and gray: “has a connotation of being the color of bare soil and is usually thought of as a somewhat indetermined, possibly uneven, in-between color.” This must be the word mentioned here by SFReader, who describes its use in Mongolian and Turkish, and possibly as a name for the wolf.

Vasmer says further that the Turkic word was borrowed from Persian; that would be Middle Persian bōr, Persian bur, ‘fair, blonde; reddish brown, bay; (dialectal) brown’. And somebody links this to the supposed PIE *bʰerH- ‘brown’, though I don’t find that connection in the PIE references. Even if it’s not PIE, all this borrowing goes to show how uncertain the boundaries have been over time between brown and gray, brown and yellow, and brown and red, with words often wandering across them.

How old is бурый медведь in Russian? Any idea when бурый might have been borrowed? And what’s the most usual and common word for “brown” in Russian now, and how old is it?

brown etc.

There are several homonymous roots *bher-, and which of them, if any, are related is anyone’s guess. It makes for fun speculation, but I don’t know if it takes us any further — worthless root etymologies and all that.

Anyway, there are at least two distinct words here, which I believe must be parallel derivations from homonymous stems derived from two of those roots, and they may have been conflated and have influenced eachother from early on or even from the beginning. One is the colour adjective, which is old enough as such to have been borrowed into Finnish (ruuni) and Old French (brun). The other is the base of ON brún f. “brow” and its relatives. Both words have an inherited long u that I think must be from zero-grade + laryngeal, i.e. *bhr-ew-H-.

One *bhr-ew- is the base of a whole complex of words used for frothing water and heat processing: ‘burn’. ‘brew’, ‘bread’, ‘broth’.

Another apparent *bhr-ew- is found in the “brow” words, which Bjorvand & Lindeman derive from *bhr-uh2-. This was extended with an *-n- in NGmc, maybe by change of paradigm from ō-stem to ōn-stem (but this doesn’t really explain anything). It was also extended in meaning to “edge, rim” as in ON brún f., pl. brýnn “eyebrow(s)”, pl. brýnir “rim of cloth, decorative band” and Norw. øyebryn “eyebrow”, skogbryn “edge of forest”.

The latter noun has a derived verb ON brýna “set ashore (of boat); Norw. dial. bryna v. “trim the edge of a cloth”, which may or may not be identical with ON brýna v. “whet, hone”. To this verb belongs ON brýni n. Norw. bryne n. “whetstone, hone”.

ON also has a couple of adjectives hinting of a meaning “clear, open”: brýnn “obvious, clear to see, simple” and brýnligr “with good expectations”.

A third *bhr-ew- is found in eg. bryte “break”, braut “clearance, road (arch.)” and brøyte “make a clearing; clear a road (of snow)”.

A fourth *bhr-ew-, apparently *bhr-u-h2-, homonymous with the “brow” word, is the base of the “bridge” word. These may or may not be the same.

What can we say about this mess? Not enough to solve it, but here’s a suggestion for a few of the knots (some of them have a long pedigree, some are all mine):

– The colour word is an n-adjective to the “brew” word, formed in Germanic in much the same way as ‘green’ to the “grow” word, so essentially “heated” or “caramellized”. (I thought I’d touted this before, but apparently not here.)

– The meaning “clearing; edge” is derived from a stem meaning “clear of vegetation”, seen in derivations like brøyte, maybe ultimately from the root “bher-” of ‘bright’ — or that of the ever-bearing beaver.

– The meanings “whet, hone” and “sharp” follow from “edge”. “Shiny” is the natural result of “whet, hone”, but it could also owe something to influence from “clear, open” or the homonymous colour word. But note English ‘burnish’.

– The “brow” word has cognates with the same meaning in distant branches, so it’s no recent semantic extension from “edge”. I think it got its -n- in NGmc by conflation with brún “clearing; edge of forest; edge”. (If “brow” is in turn a “bridge” metaphor, and since the meaning “bridge” could have come from “beam, cut-down tree”, then they could all eventually stem from the meaning “clear”, but this is just root etymology.)

(Sorry for the double post above, feel free to delete one.)

коричневый : thanks! Is it transparently “cinnamon” (or “tree bark”) to Russian speakers, or is that more something you only notice if it’s pointed out?

In English “cinnamon bear” is the accepted name for one of the many color morphs of the black bear, which is very often not black.

There is. In fact, an American cinnamon bear candy.

It’s striking how so many languages take their most common name for brown from a novel imported food or drink.

Also Spanish café, or Colombian Spanish carmelito. But then, the same can be said for orange. I’d say that rarer colors borrow often their names from foreign things, and that blues don’t take their names from foods because there are no blue foods (as everybody knew before there was internet).

Red cabbage is blue if you don’t get the pH down some way (vinegar is traditional). They have a purple cauliflower variant now that turns a bright blue when you boil it, it looks a bit alien on the plate to be honest. (I assume they crossed in the red cabbage colour so it’s really the same thing).

Also marrón is another word for brown in Spanish, I don’t know if a real Spanish person distinguishes between that and café.

Does Russian коричневый cover the same range as English brown, including dark browns?
In my experience, it does. It’s the general term for “brown”, with the exception of (as I think has been mentioned) for eye colour (karyj), some animal names (where buryj is used, as discussed), and then you normally wouldn’t say that someone has коричневый hair, but say that he (she) is a bryunet(ka). These distinctions are not related to tones of colour, but to the type of objects showing the colour.

Red cabbage is blue

Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut und Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid.

(The German-speaking area is a pretty small-scale mosaic of Rotkraut & Blaukraut depending on the traditional method of preparation. Apples are common for acid.)

German has Kornblume and kornblumenblau.
@juha: seems I wrongly used брюнет for over 30 years…

“It occurs to me now that no language I know of has separate words for the two shades of brown that exist as human eye colors.”

I am not sure how idiosyncratic this is, but to me the two Serbian words for brown, smeđ and braon, always had different connotations, with smeđe oči being light brown and braon oči being dark brown.

For reference purposes:

Template:table:colors
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Template:table:colors

@Andrej Bjelaković: That’s very interesting! Do you know, is that specifically a Serb thing, or is it common FYLOSC?

I thought sininen ‘blue’ in Finnish was a Slavic loanword, but it’s not so simple:

Unknown; possibly from Proto-Finno-Permic *sine (compare Erzya сэнь (senʹ, “blue, gray”), Moksha сенем (senem, “blue”)), or perhaps borrowed from Proto-Scythian *āxšī́ni (“blue”), or Proto-Slavic *siňь (“blue, blue-gray”). Slavic etymology suffers from phonological problems, as does the Iranian etymology. Alternatively related to Proto-Uralic *śine (“charcoal”), whence Hungarian szén, Northern Sami čitna, but this also seems unlikely.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Finnic/sini

Tangentially related:

Helmer Rainer Sinisalo: Piano Concerto – Yulia Tishkina

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uveUpMqdoqQ

Speaking of Finnic loans from Indo-European and the name of the bear, it’s been suggested that Proto-Finnic *karhu ‘bear’ was borrowed from an Indo-Iranian descendant of *h₂ŕ̥tḱos, because of taboo avoidance again. That seems unlikely to me: isn’t the taboo replacement always meaningful in the *same* language, in the cases we know for sure about?

The other suggestion is that *karhu was a taboo replacement within Proto-Finnic, meaning “rough, coarse”. Is there a Proto-Uralic ‘bear’ word reconstructable from some other Uralic languages? Not Hungarian, which has medve borrowed from Slavic.

@brett

Serbian Matica Dictionary defines smeđ as “koji je boje pržene kafe, kafen: ~ kosa, smeđe oči.” In English “that which is the colour of roasted coffee, kafen: eg. hair, eyes.”

As wecan see from the definition, kafen is another Serbian word for brown. It means coffee coloured.

Braon is defined as “smeđ, kestenjast, otvoreno mrk”. This definition gives other synonyms for brown in Serbian.

Grujić’s English-Serbocroatian Dictionary is in reality a Serbian dictionary. It was a very popular dictionary published during communist times in Yugoslavia, with many editions. The 8th edition has this definition for brown: “mrk, smeđ; taman; pocrneo”.

To recap: Serbian for brown is smeđ and mrk. Other synonyms are braon, kafen, kestenjast.

Serbian for brown is smeđ and mrk

Is “mrk” cognate with “murk”?

The etymology given in Wiktionary certainly seems to imply it:

From Middle English merke, mirke, from Old English mirce, myrce (“dark, gloomy, evil”) and Old Norse myrkr (“dark, murky”), both from Proto-Germanic *merkuz (“dark”), from Proto-Indo-European *mergʷ- (“to flicker; to darken; to be dark”). Cognate Danish mørk (“dark”), Norwegian mørk (“dark”), Swedish mörk (“dark”), Icelandic myrkur (“dark”), as also Albanian murg (“dark”), Proto-Slavic *morkъ (“darkness”), Lithuanian márgas (“multicolored”), Ancient Greek ἀμορβός (amorbós, “dark”).

(Also “mirk” (archaic) and “mark” (dialect))

I’d say коричневый is totally nontransparent as “cinnamon” by today’s speakers, but may be understood as tree-bark color. But lots of Russian color names came with the imported fabrics. One giveaway is that the fabric-and-imported-dye color names hardly ever replaced the names of colors of people and animals.

Checking коричневый or коричневые in Google books for 1800-1820, one finds references to cinnamon products, to fabrics and upholstery, and to painters’ dyes. Not to any colors of other kinds of objects.

Yes, we discussed village homespun fabric dyeing right on LH a few month ago
http://languagehat.com/mariona/

It’s a topic I thought I knew quite well, but I was surprised that imports of Asian indigo reached Russia’s hinterland as early as in the 1600s if not earlier. In the 1700s the government was already pushing for domestic production of low-grade indigo which failed. Back then, though, the foreign names didn’t yet spread with the imports. The imported indigo was just a “brick blue dye” or the same word as a domestic indigo producer, krutik

As a poison? What kind of overdose… I tried looking it up on Wikipedia, but there’s no mention of that there.

Saffron tea is absolutely awesome, though.

@dm, trond
Maybe the poisonous plant is meadow saffron.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colchicum_autumnale

It seems like poisoning someone with saffron would be absurdly expensive. And saffron poisoning might be very easy to identify with even a very primitive autopsy, if it turned turned the deceased’s mucosa yellow.

Actually, many monocot flowers that grow annually from bulbs or rhizomes are poisonous to greater or lesser degrees. (The bulbs and rhizomes might be too easy winter fodder for animals otherwise.) This includes crocuses (saffron coming from the stamens of certain crocuses), irises (which I was once mildly poisoned by), and the aforementioned Colchicaceae family of false crocuses.* The most notable toxin in the Colchicaceae is colchicine, the best medicine for the immediate treatment of severe gout flareups. The name for the taxon obviously comes from Greek Κολχίς, but I’m not sure why, since the plants are found all over the western Old World, not especially in Georgian Colchis.**

* I suppose the Allium genus is among these as well—apparently managing to hit the sweet spot of being spicy enough to deter nonhuman foragers but not actually toxic enough to keep us from using them for seasoning.

** While doing a little online research about the origins of these various noxious plants, I discovered that there is a yellow iris species Iris reichenbachii—although it is apparently not native to Switzerland.

“Taking large amounts of saffron by mouth is POSSIBLY UNSAFE. High doses of 5 grams or more can cause poisoning. Doses of 12-20 grams can cause death. ”

At $5000 / kg that would be $100, but I’ve seen $1000 / kg listed, which would be affordable.

https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-844/saffron

You laugh, but someone, somewhere is concocting $30 saffron cocktails. With caviar on the rim.

The idea that the taboo came from a fear of calling bears is only a modern guess and a bad guess. That argument relies on h₂ŕ̥tḱos being the “real” name of the bear. But it wasn’t. Why should the PIE form, which is a modern reconstruction, be the “real name”? Were people throughout history aware of PIE forms? Were there no words for bear that predated the PIE word?

All the evidence suggests that h₂ŕ̥tḱos was itself a pseudonym, and the major evidence is that the sacred name of the bear predating PIE is retained in many languages. (I won’t mention here what it is.) Thus, the use of pseudonyms for bear long predated PIE and had nothing to do with latitude or fear of bear attacks. The taboo did not even apply to bears as such, since the majority of languages in all climates retained the sacred name and used it.

What the taboo referred to was the name of the Great Bear constellation, and the reason that name was often taboo is that it was the place inhabited by the souls of the dead. (See Freud for the relationship between taboo and death.) All cultures that had taboo replacement of the bear name saw the Big Dipper as the Great Bear. Earthly bears had their names become taboo as a side-effect. That is also why other fearsome animals did not see their names become taboo. There were no taboos on the words for lion, for example.

I think that it would be smarter to buy 2-3 sachets at a time, in widely separated places and paying cash. Wearing a fake mustache is a good idea too, but it can’t be obviously fake. Do not sneer or let a sinister smile flicker across your lips; be jolly, hearty and if possible, churchy. Your final words to your victim should be especially warm-hearted.

Language taboos were common in areas where hunting was conducted in large groups—where hunting was done in small groups or as an individual effort, such as in the Kitakami mountains in Iwate Prefecture, language taboos were largely not observed (Tōno Shiritsu Hakubutsukan 1998, 40). This may be explained by the fact that language taboos or substitute language appears to be prevalent in communities where communal cooperation is essential for tasks. For the same reason, substitute language, or oki-kotoba (open-sea argot), was also traditionally used by fishermen, and some of the substitute terms are common to both yama-kotoba and oki-kotoba (Ōtō 1963, 116–17).35
One theory is that the purpose of using a special mountain argot was to avoid disclosing to the animals the hunters were pursuing what they planned to do (Kaneko 1993, 101; Azumane 1994, 9). Another is that it was to avoid the vulgarity of ordinary village language (Ōta 1998, 6). In respect to the bear, hunters used various aliases such as taishō 大将 (or “boss”), oyaji (“old man” or “boss”), nushi 主 (“master” or “god”), and ossama (a respectful but colloquial term for a middle-aged man, uncle, or Buddhist priest) (Kaneko 1993, 101). The use of such aliases for the bear is consistent with the practices among other Boreal hunting cultures in which bear ceremonialism is evident. Usually these aliases take one of three forms: kinship terms, such as “father,” “uncle,” “granddad;” names that show reverence and respect, such as “king of the forest,” “sacred animal,” “great one,” “beautiful one;” or names that refer to physical or behavioral characteristics of the bear, such as “the barefoot one,” “the honey-eater,” or “old man with a blanket” (Lot-Falk 1953, cited in Miyao 1989, 61; Rockwell 1991, 189).

From The Moon Bear as a Symbol of Yama: Its Significance in the Folklore of Upland Hunting in Japan by Catherine Knight

https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/783

Lars: It’s a cunning trap. You’ll be sitting peacefully at home, basking in pleasant memories of your sworn enemy’s agonized final moments, when you’ll hear the knock on the door of the dread Swedish Secret Police.

The very word “saffron” is, as is well known, Welsh. It used to be spelt “safron” until We pointed out that that wouldn’t do at all. By planned incremental changes, we will eventually get the English using the True Form, saffrwm, which (of course) underlies the Arabic زَعْفَرَان‎.

The Ancient Britons were poisoning their enemies with saffron long before the Arabs got involved. Also with woad.

The most notable toxin in the Colchicaceae is colchicine, the best medicine for the immediate treatment of severe gout flareups.

I used to get gout attacks many years ago, when I was about 20. Colchicine is very effective, but very bad for the stomach.

All the evidence suggests that h₂ŕ̥tḱos was itself a pseudonym

Rather weak and negative evidence from Anatolian only.

the major evidence is that the sacred name of the bear predating PIE is retained in many languages. (I won’t mention here what it is.)

Secret evidence is no evidence at all: science, like justice, is a public pursuit or it is nothing.

The recession of euphemisms is common to this day. I remember janitor —> custodian —> housekeeping in my own personal history. (When this group became politicized, their chosen name was “Janitors for Justice”). In the case of black Americans and Latino Americans, the recession is even more complicated.

The recession of euphemisms:
I still can think of none better than cretin and idiot.

The real secret ‘name’ which summons the bear isn’t even a word, it’s an action.

(And I say to them, “BEARS!
Just look at me walking in all of the squares.”)

“Arrested Development” may have had its day, but it quickly became the name of a band.

J.-f.-o.M., I’ve read some people referring to themselves as “Aspies”.

Asperger’s syndrome

But isn’t Asperger himself being canceled because he literally cooperated with the Nazis?

I thought that “high-functioning autism” was the new preferred term.

Som of my friends relevant to this discussion refer to themselves as being “on the spectrum”. This is insider terminology and self-reference and allows for variatiant forms. It sidesteps a lot of the tedious questions.

I find “on the spectrum” to be too cutesy. I would not feel comfortable using that to describe my son, who has mild autism spectrum disorder. Fortunately, his symptoms are mild enough that we seldom have to refer to the condition at all. (Actually this makes me think that I should ask him what his own preferred terminology is now—although, knowing him, he will probably say he doesn’t care.)

On the other hand, I used to joke that his mother had “attention deficit spectrum disorder”—clearly not diagnosable with AD[H]D but displaying milder versions of most of the traits that characterize attention deficit. (She did not disagree with that assessment.)

There were no taboos on the words for lion, for example.

This is just not the case, and “bear” is by no means unique among dangerous-animal names in being replaced by circumlocutions among the various languages of the world.

Moba fùàdāāǹ “lion” is a transparent compound, “master of the forest”, for example (contrast the unanalysable Kusaal synonym gbigim.)

“Wolf” is an example within Salish:

https://lingpapers.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2018/03/1976_Suttles_2.pdf

“Wolf”

The name ōkami (wolf) is derived from the Old Japanese öpö-kamï, meaning “great-spirit”.[4] In the Shinto religion, wild animals were associated with the mountain spirit Yama-no-kami.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_wolf#Etymology

But isn’t Asperger himself being canceled because he literally cooperated with the Nazis?

The way I read it some 20 years ago, he actually saved people’s lives by convincing the Nazis his patients weren’t Life Not Worth Living™ but were actually good at certain things that could, sometimes, be useful.

But, as far as I understand, the term has been abandoned since then because “Asperger’s syndrome” can’t be clearly delimited from other things, so it’s been merged with “autism” to “the autism spectrum”. The lists of diagnostic features I’ve encountered contain many items like “a certain unusual feature or its equally unusual opposite”. I’m convinced it’s several different things with completely different causes.

“Spectrum” terminology has the further advantage that it sounds like it reaches all the way to “normal”. Lots of people have been expected to behave “normally” because they’re “not full-blown autists”, and have suffered when they didn’t.

>Moba fùàdāāǹ “lion” is a transparent compound, “master of the forest”,

I’m curious in what language, and what the semantic range of forest is. As presented, this is an ecological misnomer, after all. It would seem to suggest not close experience of danger leading to taboo, but rather the rarity of the experience leading to inaccurate terminology.

Edit – I took this to be a phrase “moba fuadaan” and later realized it’s “fuadaan” in the Moba language. Northern Ghana would seem to have been within range of lions. Anyway, my larger point is that the existence of taboo creature names in some cultures is so far from proof that bear is an avoidance of the “real” name of the bear that it doesn’t even constitute evidence.

“Forest” was my lazy rendering; the Moba word has a broader reference, and can describe any sort of terrain not suitable for agriculture, including savannah with only scattered trees (which is the default landscape in those parts.) “Wasteland”, perhaps. Kusaal sian’ar has pretty much the same semantic range: in the Bible translation it’s used both for where Jesus was tempted for forty days, and for where you would go to gather firewood.

There are few to no lions now, but they used to be common and are a solid part of traditional culture.

Anyway, my larger point is that the existence of taboo creature names in some cultures is so far from proof that bear is an avoidance of the “real” name of the bear that it doesn’t even constitute evidence.

I was just responding to a previous erroneous claim that this sort of replacement (however motivated) was unique to words for “bear.”

The existence of tabu creature names in other cultures is relevant, however, at least in the negative sense that if there were no parallels elsewhere, it would make the hypothesis of tabu replacement for Indoeuropean “bear” words much more unlikely.

I don’t have any evidence in the particular Moba case that the substitution was driven by tabu, although it’s not a priori impossible; clans have their own individual specific tabus, at any rate (the royal clan of the Dagomba may not eat lions …)

No two branches of Oti-Volta seem to share the same etymon for “lion”, except that Buli gbengli looks cognate-ish to the Western Oti-Volta form seen in Kusaal gbigim. Yom has siɣ-sawa, which means “master of the bush”, like the Moba, though the individual components are unrelated*; otherwise the various branches have different unanalysable words.

Much the same is true of words for “horse”, as I mentioned elsewhere, but there you can make an argument that the animal itself was relatively unfamiliar in the area at one time.

*Though the siɣ- component is probably cognate to Kusaal sian’ar, which derives from a Proto-Kusaal *sɛ̃grɪ, with the stem *sɛ̃g-.

Yes. But the whole vowel sequence ian’a actually patterns as a two-mora monophthong, despite being realised [jã̰:]. The word sian’ar “forest, wasteland, bush” has the form CV:C phonemically.

The 2016 standard Kusaal orthography unfortunately uses the symbol n ambiguously, but it’s always a nasalisation marker rather than /n/ when it precedes the ‘ vowel glottalisation symbol. In practice, the considerable limitations on possible word-internal consonant clusters reduce the potential for ambiguity a lot, except when the symbol n is word-final; in that position, the older orthography used nn for nasalisation and single n for /n/.

The written sequences ia and ua are also ambiguous, and can represent either [ja] [wa] or [ia] [ua]. I add diacritics to disambiguate these things in my grammar.

“Olokun” is likely to be the Orisha Olóòkun. Gods have groves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olokun

The Igbo language is not particularly closely related to Yoruba, and AFAIK “Igbo” in Igbo itself just means “Igbo.”

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp/igbo/IGBO%20Dictionary.pdf

Igbo-Ukwu (which is what I imagine you meant) apparently does indeed mean “Great Igbo”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igbo-Ukwu

Following up on my earlier remark about underground plant parts frequently being poisonous, there is this wonderful quote from Erewhon, in the midst of chapter XXVII and a discussion of the “intelligence” of plants:

Some are so clever as even to overreach themselves, like the horse-radish, which gets pulled up and eaten for the sake of that pungency with which it protects itself against underground enemies.

Erewhon (1872), by Samuel Butler, is itself is a rather unusual novel. It begins with an outdoors adventure story, modeled on the author’s experiences working at a sheep station in Mesopotamia, New Zealand. The bulk of the story is a satire, very much in the vein of Gulliver’s Travels, although I don’t think Butler’s writing ever reaches the same level as Jonathan Swift at his best. However, what is probably most notable about the novel, especially today, is that near the conclusions of his social satire, Butler works into it a serious discussion of the potential meaning and significance of artificial life and intelligence, something that he had been considering for many years and had previously written about more briefly in the 1863 essay “Darwin Among the Machines.”

Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (advice to the New Left from an old lefty) has since become the bible of the reactionaries.

I’ve been reading a work a fiction which has, as an aside, some odd animal naming taboos among some Scottish fishermen. On the off chance that this was a real thing that was inserted, I searched and found:

Fishing Superstitions

Because of the dangerous nature of their work, they were unusually superstitious. Thus there were words considered as very unlucky e.g. to mention the word minister was never done – he was called the man in the black coat, the words rabbit, salmon (red fish), rat (lang tail), pig (curly tail), and salt were amongst the most forbidden words. Should the men encounter a hare, a dog, or a person with red hair they were likely to refuse to put to sea and, if a rabbit, hare, dove, or pigeon were found on board they would most certainly not set out. The antidote to bad-luck words was to touch cauld iron.

Fishermen’s Superstitions – Cockenzie and Port Seton

some still feel it is bad luck to mention certain birds, fish and animals either on their boats,at home, or at all. In the fishing villages of Cockenzie Port Seton near Edinburgh these include swans, salmon, pigs and rats. Instead, fishermen will refer to a ‘red fish’ (salmon), a ‘curly tail’ (pig) and a ‘long tail’ (rat).

Christ, two comments about able[-]whackets, submitted to the same post a mere two years apart. “[‘My] only worry is jungle rot.” (from a song about a full-rigged ocean-going sailing ship that has somehow wound up in the middle of the Amazon: it need fear no pirates, storms, barnacles, etc., because …)

January First-of-May:

> I think it’s the kind of connection where if you start wondering where X came from you would probably guess correctly but have to think about it a little, whereas with purple/lilac and pink/rose the answer is so obvious there’s no real reason to actually think about it. I don’t think it qualifies as “transparent”, but it might not require actively being pointed out either.

Similar for me in Bulgarian, I think. You could interpret “розова вода” as either “rosewater” or “rose-coloured (pink) water”, but unless pointed out you would never interpret it as “rose-coloured (pink) water”.

There’s an American author named Daniel Pinkwater; I’ve long assumed that the family name in Poland was Rosenwasser and that something got lost in translation.

Oh dear.

Since I was reading A Primate’s Memoir, I came across this:

On some occasions, I was struck with how much of the outside world Rhoda could have gotten hints of, while still having an utterly Masai mindset. This I experienced the day I quizzed her about how to say “lion” in Maa. I had been leafing through my new Maa dictionary and had discovered that there are actually two names for lion. One, which I had been taught by Rhoda, turns out to be the fake name for lion. It is the one you say out in the open, and is not the real name. The real name, in contrast, is said only in the safety of your house at night. The dictionary explained that the Masai believe that if you say the real name of the lion out-of-doors, the lion will hear its name being called, will come and eat you.

Howsabout it, Rhoda, is that true? Yes, it is true, you should not say that name; she gets visibly itchy each time I do. Aw, come on, Rhoda, the lion isn’t going to come. Yes, I have seen that many times, it will come and eat you. Aw, come on, really. Well, I have heard that that will happen.

I push harder. Come on, Rhoda, are you telling me that the lion will hear its name, you know that lions cannot understand that, they wouldn’t come.

Yes, they will come.

The lion understands Masai language?

Finally, she gets irritated, and in one petulant paragraph, sums up the two worlds she knows about and how she balances them.

“The lion cannot understand its name. Anyone who has been to school knows that a lion cannot understand the language of people…. But if you say that word too many times outside, the lion will come and eat you.”

The subject was closed, as far as she was concerned.

Sapolsky taunting Rhoda makes me wince.

This Intro to Maasai has:

  Ol’ngatun – lion

(no mention of a taboo or another word for it)

This 1905 Masai grammar has:

  O-lo-‘l-masi (the-of-the-mane), the lion

and

  Ol-ñgatuny   the lion

and

  Ol-ōwaru-kitok (the-beast-of-prey-big)   The lion
  O-lo-‘l-masi (the-of-the-mane)   The lion

The grammar above does not mention there being a taboo on saying “lion” outside among the Maasai, at least that I could find.

Assuming that there was at some point such a taboo, I’d guess that “maned one” and “big beast of prey” were circumlocutions for Ol-ñgatuny/Ol’ngatun .

Anyway, I got to laugh about the etymology of Pinkwater again. I had completely forgotten it.

zyxt (2018): On “wolf”: the Hungarian word, farkas, apparently refers to the tail. This too is possibly taboo avoidance.

Also “deer” is szarvas in Hungarian, meaning “horned one”, possibly for the same reason.

(Stupid machine trick of the day: DeepL translates A szarvas a párosujjú patások közé tartozó emlősállat as “The deer is a mammal that belongs to the mammalian odd-toed ungulates.” D’oh! Yet párosujjú patások by itself comes out correctly, “even-toed ungulates”.)

Yes, that does seem to be endorsed by Uralicists. Wiktionary has Proto-Uralic śarwe ‘antler, horn’ borrowed from Proto-Indo-Iranian ćr̥Hwás, with a link to Uralonet and references to other books.

And speaking of satem, Proto-Uralic is also generally said to have gotten ‘100’ (Hungarian száz) from an Indo-Iranian language as well.

Trond Engen, the *-s is the nominative singular ending, which as I recall is usually not reflected in Uralic borrowings.

Thanks to all for the confirmation!

@drasvi: Icelandic (Þórr < *Þunraz) and Faeroese, though not as recognizable now.

Lithuanian/Latvian (lv vīrs = ‘man’).

If we’re talking any -s, not just the PIE o-stem nominative., then the English possessive -s could probably be counted as a survival from PIE. (Lots of analogy there, I’m sure, but an -s it is).

French fils? Presumably there are other words, especially if you include those where the [s] is present only in liaison (Charles).

What langauges preserve -s?

If on the Uralic side, it does seem that borrowing IE masculine nouns with their *-s in tow became possible already around Indo-Iranian times, one classic example from Finnish is taivas for ‘heaven’. Mordvinic has a few of these around too, e.g. Erzya paz, Moksha pavas for ‘god’ — from one step earlier *paɣas, which you might then recognize as a reflex of *bʰagʰas. But that is still an innovation (no word-final *s can be reconstructed anywhere in Proto-Uralic), so no wonder that *-s got just left off in a number of other loans.

Szarvas just has a native adjectival suffix -Vs though (and as per Hungarian’s gotcha orthography for sibilants, has /ʃ/, not /s/).

I have wondered before too how many actual exact equivalents we might find anymore if we tried to reconstruct PIE *-s just from Icelandic + Baltic + Greek… there are too a few still directly compareable etyma like kambur ~ žambas ~ γόμφος << *ǵómbʰos (and even Finnic hammas, ironically also the only one of these that still means ‘tooth’). Unsure if enough that people would accept the reconstruction just from modern data however.

Mordvinic has a few of these around too, e.g. Erzya paz, Moksha pavas for ‘god’ — from one step earlier *paɣas, which you might then recognize as a reflex of *bʰagʰas.
The PIE etymon is *bhago-s, so shouldn’t we rather reconstruct an Iranian pre-form with /*b/ and intervocalic spirantisation of the /*g/ than an Indo-Iranian form with media aspirata?