Thread by @_roryturnbull

Fun fact: The word "bear" is originally "the brown one" because there was a taboo against saying the bear's true name. Time for a thread about animal name taboos! /1

https://twitter.com/gregbuchanan/status/1113060972581728258

The Proto-Indo-European word for bear was *h₂ŕ̥tḱos, literally "the destroyer". This is reflected in modern French "ours", Greek "arktos", Sanskrit "ṛ́kṣa", Persian "خرس", and others. The name "Arthur" comes from the Welsh form. /2

Germanic tribes re-dubbed the bear "the brown one" to avoid saying its name. Russians called it "honey eater", and Lithuanians "the licker", possibly in reference to the folk theory that bears are born formless and their mothers lick them into shape. /3

Outside of Europe we see similar taboos. In the 1930s Bloomfield reported the Menominee called the bear "little what-you-may-call-him", and there is evidence that some Siouan languages borrowed the Algonquian word for bear so as to avoid using their own word. /4

In Siberia, the Yeniseian people call the tiger "grandfather". The Nanai call it "the old man of the taiga", and have a ton of fun stories about how tigers will fuck. you. up. if you cross them. /5

In several Dravidian languages, the tiger is referred to as "the dog" or "the jackal". Frazer (author of The Golden Bough) wrote that the Aka-Kol language called the tiger "he with the claws", and the elephant was "he with the teeth". /6

(Frazer also bizarrely identified Aka-Kol as a Dravidian language (!), so we should maybe take that with a grain of salt. We can't check his work because, thanks to British colonialism, every last Aka-Kol person is dead...) /7

We see these taboos in the water too. Faroese fisherfolk in the 1700s referred to the halibut as "the warrior", and whales were metonymically called "water spouts". /8

The seal, at one time an important prey for north sea peoples, was varyingly called "the little bitter-mouthed one", "the little one under the cliff", "the grey bald-head", and "the one beyond the fjord". /9

Curiously, these taboos did not apply on land - there you could say the true names. But at sea, you must use the sjómál ("sea language"). The puffin is "grey cheek"! /10

Is this like saying "you-know-who" instead of "Voldermort"? After all, "fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself" (Granger, 1997). /11

In these cases, though, the words are taboo not because of *fear*, but because of *respect*. Nature is powerful, and we show it respect by treating it with dignity and not using overly-familiar language with it. Words have power. /fin

Now for the supplementary tweets with *citations*! Bloomfield's claim about Menominee is from his classic 1933 textbook "Language". On Algonquian and Siouan words for "bear", see Jacques, G. (2012). A Siouan-Algonquian Wanderwort: the name of the bear. Amerindia, 36:183-189.

For discussion of the Slavic and Dravidian cases, see Emeneau, M. B. (1948). Taboos on Animal Names. Language, 24(1), 56.

On taboo language in the North Sea communities, see Lockwood, W. B. (1955). Word taboo in the language of the Faroese fishermen. Transactions of the Philological Society, 54(1), 1–24, and...

Knooihuizen, R. (2008). Fishing for words: the taboo language of Shetland fishermen and the dating of Norn language death. Transactions of the Philological Society, 106(1), 100–113. The author tweets at @remcoknooi!

And finally, if you want anthropologically-inspired fiction concerning the power of the true names of things, you could do worse than to read Ursula Le Guin's "Earthsea" series.