Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees

Re:Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees by drb91 on Monday March 19, 2018 @08:08PM (#16624689)

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. :)

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Re:Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees by benbreen on Monday March 19, 2018 @10:17PM (#16625466)

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)."

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Re:Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees by pimlottc on Monday March 19, 2018 @09:21PM (#16625119)

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...

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Re:Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees by aquadrop on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @03:17AM (#16626534)

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

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Re:Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees by mormegil on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @03:35AM (#16626590)

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

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Re:Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees by aquadrop on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @08:02AM (#16627747)

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...

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Re:Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees by lokopodium on Monday March 19, 2018 @08:49PM (#16624926)

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

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Re:Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees by pandaman on Monday March 19, 2018 @09:51PM (#16625324)

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".

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Re:Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees by thriftwy on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @03:21AM (#16626553)

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

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Re:Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees by pandaman on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @02:40PM (#16631317)

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

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Re:Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees by hprotagonist on Monday March 19, 2018 @09:08PM (#16625037)

better be extra-super careful! :)

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