A recent note by Toki Ponist and linguist extraordinaire "jan Telakomen" (aka Joel Thomas), "North/south idea", led to the mini-essay "The Brown One, The Honey Eater, The Shaggy Coat, The Destroyer " by Charles Bigelow. It discusses PIE (Proto-Indo-European) and words for "bear" in various languages — the Latin "ursus", the Greek "arktos", the Russian "medved", etc. In particular, bears are sometimes referred to euphemistically:
... The Germanic speaking peoples, who inhabited and hunted in northern climes and were presumably in frequent contact with the bear, did not use its common name. Instead, they used a circumlocution: "the brown one", and this is reflected in the modern word for bear in all the Germanic languages. Linguists hypothesize that in old common Germanic, the true name of the bear was under a taboo – not to be spoken directly. The exact details of the taboo are not known. Did it apply to hunters who were hunting the bear and did not want to warn it? Or to hunters hunting other animals and did not want to rile up the bear and have it steal their prey? Or did it apply to anyone who did not want to summon the bear by its name and perhaps become its prey? Whatever the details, the taboo worked so well that no trace of the original *rkto- word remains in Germanic languages, except as borrowed historically in learned words from Greek or Latin. The Greeks and Romans apparently had a more laid-back relationship with the bear, perhaps because there were relatively few encounters, and preserved the ancient name.
Similarly, in Slavic languages a bear is a "honey-eater"; in Baltic tongues, a "hairy one"; in the original PIE, a "destroyer". Bigelow's essay concludes:
So, perhaps we can take a tip from the Germanic, Slavic, and Baltic peoples who knew the bear on something like equal terms in the Boreal forests of thousands of years ago, and reduce our chance of conflict with the bear by not using his name in a rude way. Regrettably, the Indo-European linguistic evidence does not reveal the ursine flip-side. There is no hint of what word the bear uses for man. Probably, anything it wants.
In Toki Pona, perhaps:
soweli pi pimeja jelo
soweli pi moku telo suwi
soweli pi selo linja
soweli pi pakala suli
| toki pona | rough translation |
|---|
| soweli pi pimeja jelo | beast of dark yellow |
| soweli pi moku telo suwi | beast of sweet liquid food |
| soweli pi selo linja | beast of hairy skin |
| soweli pi pakala suli | beast of great damage |
(cf Conceptual Metaphor (2012-06-19), The Bear and the Nightingale (2021-06-22), Animals and Language (2024-01-08), Patterns in the Mind (2024-05-12), ...) - ^z - 2025-10-21