In Czech we say “the honey eater”, for the same reason.

I thought we knew this. I remember being told Arthur wasn’t King Arthur’s real name, but an epithet like Lionheart, only for bear.

Ah yes, the black brown one

In the Indo-European family it’s mostly the Balto-Slavic and Germanic branches that avoided the original word, *h₂ŕ̥tḱos - the first one replaced it with “honey-eater”, the second one as you said with “the brown one” (IIRC it would be *bʰérh₃os or similar)

If *h₂ŕ̥tḱos survived in Germanic it would’ve become **urght [ɜːt] in English, and probably **Urcht [uɐ̯χt] in German. Not sure in the Slavic languages, but Lithuanian (Baltic) does keep irštvà for “bear den”, so the bear itself would be probably **irštas.

I’ve heard that factoid numerous times over the years, but I never saw a single source for it. I’d love to read more about this.

That’s Gravity Falls, right?

How did it go again

If it’s black, fight back

If it’s brown, lie down

If it’s white, good night

Black bears woll give you a bluff charge before running away. Of course, this bluff charge is super effective because like hell am i gonna try to fight a bear

One of my biggest fears of riding MTB in grizzly country is spooking one while out riding.

I’ve seen videos of people that have been chased and I don’t know if I’d survive.

Also: Diceros bicornis

“two-horned two-horner”

How do you say twink in ancient Greek and Latin?

Interestingly, Latin ursus and Greek arktos are cognates. Both come from the Proto-Indo-European word for “bear”, h₂ŕ̥tḱos.

This word is interesting in that it contains an example of what’s called (for various reasons) a “thorn cluster”. Certain words in PIE containing the cluster “tk”, for whatever reason, underwent metathesis (switching places) in most of the IE daughter languages. This is why the PIE word has a “tk”, but the Greek word has a “kt”.

This is one of the many reasons for thinking that the Anatolian branch of Indo-European (Hittite, Luvian, etc.) branched off from PIE first - the Hittite word for “bear”, ḫar-tág-ga-aš, still shows the PIE order of “t” and “k” (the Hittite double-g was probably something similar to a “k” in this environment, and what appears to be an intervening “a” is a shortcoming of Hittite’s cuneiform writing system), meaning that this family of languages branched off before the rest of the family underwent this shared change of “tk” to “kt”.

Another fun fact about the “bear” word is that all of Germanic has completely lost it. Instead, in prehistoric times they innovated a formation meaning “the brown one”, which is still reflected in Modern English bear.

This is thought to have been due to taboo avoidance. When you’re hunting the bear (or maybe when the bear is hunting you), you don’t want to actually say the true name of the animal, because that would either scare it away or bring it to you, whichever is worse under the circumstances. So, you instead call it “the brown one” so as not to draw its attention, and so, over time, the true word for “bear” in Germanic was completely lost.

A similar process may have happened with the source of one of the primary Slavic words for “bear”, medved <*medu-ed “honey-eater” (the first part cognate with English “mead”, and the second with “eat”).

Greek.

Bearlandia and it’s polar opposite, Nobearlandia