Life in the Cheese Drawer

so i just learned this the other day whilst browsing reddit.

the word bear actually is derived from old english bera, meaning the brown one – this is common throughout norse, dutch, german, etc. it’s derived from greek and latin, which have the root for bear, but why do these languages call a bear just by its color?

well, olde timey hunters in the northern parts pretty much replaced the names of wild animals because of a taboo on names of wild animals. other names for bear were the good calf, honey pic, the licker, honey eater. there are also variations of calling it the wild.

bears were so stinking scary to hunters that they couldn’t even call it by its name.

i did some very brief research on native american words for bears and tried to look up some etymology on those. the closest thing i could find that was sort of similar was the ojibwe word mukwa for bear, which actually means great. so sort of the same thing – replacing it with a descriptor. although, isn’t that a lot of words we have, especially onomatopoeia words?