A real map I made because I do a real degree for real people

Okay, let’s explain this, because it’s mean not to. Basically, almost every language in Europe is descended from the same ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. The exceptions are Samí languages, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Basque. So we’d expect similar words for bears.

We’ve kind of got this; the PIE was probably something kinda like *artkos-ish, PIE scholars will know exactly! This gives us lots of recognisable things; the name Arthur (bear!), the word Arctic (towards the North Star, aka Ursa Minor), and indeed Ursa itself...

as well as French ours, Italian orsa, and all sorts of recognisable things. This comes from proto-Celtic *artos (Arthur), Latin Ursa (Romance languages), and Greek arktos (Arctic, Hellenic languages), all themselves descended from PIE. In the North, we’ve got – um – not that.

In Germanic languages, we’ve got words like bear, bruin, bär, björn. These are all descended from an entirely different PIE root, meaning something like “brown one”. Fair enough, but a bit confusing. Let’s go East.

In Slavic languages, we’ve got things like Niedźwiedź, медведь, medvěd. These come from proto-Slavic *medvědь, all descended from another set of PIE roots, this time meaning something like “honey eater”. (We also deal with the first exception here, medve, a borrowing)

karu comes from a proto-Finnic word meaning something like devil. has SO MANY NICKNAMES FOR BEARS IT’S ASTOUNDING, but they’re also all euphemistic – old one, brown one, honey eater, etc. There are a couple of other fun unique words too...

Old English Beowulf is a kenning (2 nouns to mean another noun!) of bee-wolf, wolf of bees, bear.
Lokys, which means something like trampler.
Lācis is the same, let’s say stomper.
Samí languages similarly have tons, my favourite of which is Tarfok ‘moss gatherer’

Hence back to my original map, which more simply could be divided into the rough South, using the PIE for bear, and the rough North, using individual words. But something unites all those words – they’re all euphemistic, describing a feature of bears!

Okay, maybe all words do this, and the PIE might be something like “destroyer” but you can only have a euphemism if you’ve already got an original word that you’re trying not to say. And this is important too – you’re trying not to say the bear word.

But wait.

Why?

To work out why, we need another map. This is the distribution of bear species in Europe now. Sadly I could not find a map of bear distribution 2,500 years ago but you get the idea. Northern Europe? Has a lot of bears. .

And bears are scary. Bears are bigger than you. Quite often, you worship bears. Whatever you do, you certainly do NOT invoke the bear’s name in vain. In fact, the word bear is probably incredibly taboo. But you need to describe what’s coming for you, so you use euphemisms!

That’s the basic idea – it’s quite possibly history’s oldest euphemism. My tongue in cheek map charts who was historically afraid of bears, but also what that meant on their language. Thank you for bearing with me this far (badum tish) – let’s just look at some conclusions...

People often say “why study dead languages”, and it’s true, I can’t strike up conversations in Old English. *sad hwæt noises*. I can read some beautiful poetry and some interesting texts, it’s true, but those are in translation too. There’s more than that.

The thing is – perhaps thankfully – ASNC isn’t a language degree. It’s an everything degree. We think about language and how it affected history, how history affected literature, and how literature affected language, and so much more.

Thinking about dead languages like this makes them come alive, and think about how our biases and fears affect our language. Nothing is more relevant now than that.