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Day: January 8, 2016

What was the original word for “bear”?

By: | Post date: 2016-01-08 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Other Languages

What the OP may (or may not) be getting at is the fact that lots of Indo-European languages use descriptive words for bear, rather than the original Indo-European. This makes linguists surmise that there was a taboo about naming bears, so that euphemisms took the word’s place. Thus, the Germanic words for bear ultimately mean […]