I think you can probably understand why I might mix them up and think that Ursus arctos arctos is the polar bear, right?

@Felthry
Bearoneous.

@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

@daylight yeah but I doubt all indo-european languages did, and we know quite a bit about how sound changes worked in the germanic langauges

@Felthry yeah totally im just not a linguist lol

@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

@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"