Taboo nicknames for the bear trace to a Proto-Indo-European root behind Ursus arctos

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Key facts

• Hallowell calls it one of the most constant practices that the bear is referred to by a term other than its generic name, and notes the bear is the constant recipient of circumlocution terms across the whole area studied while the animals so named vary from tribe to tribe.
• The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root (given as *h2orsos) is reflected in Greek arktos and in Latin ursus, the latter being the source of the species name Ursus arctos, the Eurasian brown bear.
• The video argues the English word 'bear' does not descend from that root but from a euphemism: Proto-Germanic *bero became Old English bera and then modern bear; other peoples substitute names such as 'honey eater' or 'the brown one'.
• Kinship euphemisms are widespread: 'cousin', 'brother', 'grandfather'; the Plains Cree use musa, 'the angry one' or 'wrangler', and elsewhere the bear is called 'four-legged human'.
• Hallowell cites the St. Francis Abnaki, among whom only the elderly still call the bear 'cousin' because the practice was being abandoned as European metaphysics subsumed the tribal worldview.
• Among the Thompson River Indians each animal's true name can be revealed only by a guardian spirit and is passed from father to son; a hunter who knows the grizzly's name gains power over it so that it becomes gentle and harmless.

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