Reminder that the bat-eared fox's scientific name literally means "eardog bigears"
while we're at it, the brown bear's scientific name translates to "bear bear bear"
this is a repost to fix an erroneous earlier version of this post, where I mistakenly said that bear bear bear was the polar bear, when it is actually the brown bear
@Felthry fun fact, the word bear is descended from the norse word Bjorn, which just means brown.
this is because the norse believed calling an animal by its true name would summon it so instead of calling bears their word for bears they just called them brown. whatever that true name was has been lost to history
@daylight I bet you could reconstruct a half-decent guess at what it was though, just by knowing the name in other related language families
@Felthry maybe but the closest languages to old norse also had this belief
long, bear linguistics
@daylight we know that whatever the PIE word for bear was, it developed into "ursus" in Latin and "αρκτος" in Greek, and if you add a few other languages to the mix you should be able to get a decent enough idea of it
Looking it up on wiktionary, the reconstructed PIE word is *h₂ŕ̥tḱos (h₂ is an unknown sound thought to be a laryngeal consonant but it might also be a vowel) so if you were to bother tracing that forward through the sound changes in Germanic you'd probably get a good idea of what the word for bear was
re: long, bear linguistics, it got lewd somehow???
@daylight and in the process of trying to track down what a reasonable estimate of the norse word for bear would have been, I discovered this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%90%8C%80%F0%90%8C%93%F0%90%8C%95%F0%90%8C%84%F0%90%8C%81%F0%90%8C%96%F0%90%8C%88%F0%90%8C%86#Noric
which is a Noric given name that means something like "bear penis"
@Felthry yeah totally im just not a linguist lol