random amusing thing: we know that bears used to have another name in germanic languages but not what that name was
the word bear originates from an old germanic word meaning something along the lines of "the brown one", because people were terrified of bears and the usual thing of not being comfortable saying the name of such things
i wonder if there's some minor language or dialect somewhere that's preserved something related to the original name
-F
@Felthry Greek and Latin both sorta kept it! https://xkcd.com/2381/
@lorxus well i'm talking specifically about the germanic language family! though this is old enough that it's probably related to arctos, yeah
-F
@lorxus for some reason i feel like it would be closer to the greek than the latin but i can't really say why i think that? latin just feels more different from germanic than greek does
and yeah you're the second one to link that! it's good and i'd forotten about ti
-F
@lorxus "latin is more ungerman than greek" is the kind of sentence you only get out of us, hah
-F
@Felthry There's actually some doubt over whether "bear" really did mean "the brown one", mostly because it's not clear that there even was a word meaning "brown" that could become "bear". An alternative explanation that's very hard to dismiss is that it comes from an older word meaning "wild animal" (related to Latin ferus, for instance).
@KamareDrache i could see the connection between ferus and bear but what about other germanic words for bear, like bjørn? There's also apparently an old english word for bear, bruin, that sounds way closer to the modern word brown than anything else -F
@Felthry "bear" and the other Germanic words all come from Proto-Germanic *berô. bjørn in particular comes from the accusative stem *bernu-. Bruin apparently comes from the Dutch word bruin "brown", which is cognate with English "brown".
@Felthry as a matter of fact: https://xkcd.com/2381/