Correct. “Bear” actually derives from the word for “brown” (aka “the brown one”) rather that the PIE <asterisk>rkto- — think “ursus”. In facr, all germanic words derived from <asterisk>rkto- appear to be loan words from romance language (eg arctic).

Seems like the slavic version is roughly equivalent to “honey eater”.

Personally I’ve always thought this is because bears can both stand on two legs and roughly share a diet with humans. :)

I've been making my way through David Anthony's The Horse, the Wheel and Language (really well-written book if anyone is interested, btw) and the thing about Proto-Indo-Europeans having some kind of religious taboo against naming bears is one of my favorite theories in it. I've been trying to learn Farsi and have some Latin, and it has been a lot of fun finding the points of origin in the really ancient words (Farsi word for bear is khers, which I assume is etymologically linked to ursus.)

I just dug into the topic a bit more and came across the theory that King Arthur's name means "bear king" - fun correlate with the "Bee Warrior" mentioned above :)

From Wikipedia: "Another possibility is that it is derived from a Brittonic patronym Arto-rīg-ios (the root of which, arto-rīg- 'bear-king' is to be found in the Old Irish personal name Art-ri)."

Atlas Obscura just had a nice article on this. "Wolf" is another example.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-does-dagnabbit-me...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

I think slavic version is "the one who knows where the honey is" or "the one who controls the honey"

Nope, that is a folk etymology, see https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic...

Hm, interesting, always thought it was from parts 'med' and 'ved'. Though Ukrainian's 'vedmed' kinda contradicts suggestion that first part it 'medv'. Maybe it started some long time ago with 'honey eater' and then transitioned...

Funnily, Old Slavic for bear is бер, cognate to bear. However, this word became taboo too.

Is it? I thought it is not known. Some people believe it's "behr" because of "behrlohga" - "bear den" but there is more plausible etymology for that being derived from actual Old Slavic "trash"/"dirt" than "behr + lohg".

But then it is derived from "brown" (dirt, garbage) in the same way as in English.

I doubt it has a close connection to "brown". "Behr-" in Slavic languages, when stands for any color at all, is, usually, for "white".

better be extra-super careful! :)

Noa-names are fascinating, the flipside to true names being taboo, because they would summon the thing.

Indo-european had a word for bear, but it's completely eradicated in germanic languages, and replaced with the noa-name: Bear. The brown one. The original rtko/arktos/ursus never made it.

Wolf works the same way in Swedish, the common word is "varg", which is a noa-name meaning cattle-killer. Ulv, derived from ulfr/wulf/vlk exists and means the same thing, but it's archaic.

"Ulv, derived from ulfr/wulf/vlk exists and means the same thing, but it's archaic."

Though it might be archaic in Swedish, but it is also the Norwegian word for wolf. I'd guess that it is really easy to adapt the archaic Swedish word if the person has lived or spent a lot of time in Norway.

Yes, most Swedes will understand "ulv" as well, but it's associated with stories for children from long ago, if that makes sense. It exists in expressions and derived words, so "werewolf" is "varulv", and "a wolf in sheep's clothing" is "en ulv i fårakläder", for example.

So the word is still there, it's not completely taboo like the original word for bear.

I’ve never heard of a noa-name, and my attempts to Google frustratingly return only meanings of the name Noa. Do you have any good starting points for me to learn about this? It’s so very up my alley, and I’d love to learn more.

'Noa' is a Polynesian term apparently; basically it's the opposite of 'taboo' (also Polynesian.)

It's not on the face of it a very confidence-inspiring source, but r/askhistorians is as good as Reddit gets, and the poster here wrote an actual book on the subject. Give it a read: https://thingsonreddit.com/things/13812/comments/

I love /r/askhistorians, they have fantastic contributions and moderation. Thanks very much for this.

Yeah, I tried a quick googling for it as well, and got buried in resources about the name Noah instead.

I thought it would be more wide-spread, but there's wikipedia pages for it in Swedish, Norwegian and Iceland at least:

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noaord

Fortunately Google translate does a good job with that, thanks very much. I really love learning about new quirks of language.

I’ve read it now, and that’s so cool. It also cam with some good references I’m going to get into now. Thanks again. :)

Interesting. Albanian here, your examples in our language are:

Bear: Ari Wolf: Ujk

Citation for the claim that "beowulf" is "bee-hunter" ?

I'd learned from a graduate school course in germanic linguistics it was likely bear-wolf...but i'm curious where you got your claim.

According to Wikipedia [0], Bee-Hunter is one of several competing etymologies, additionally including Bee-Wolf, Bear-Hunter, Thor-wolf, Beow-wolf, and Woodpecker.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_(hero)

True names can be dangerous things, impossible to unspeak.

In the computers, i suppose an object's memory address is its true name, which is why we go to such great lengths to conceal it, with opaque handles, ASLR, etc.