Kid Rock - All Summer Long [Official Music Video]
The Latin word for bear is "ursus", from which is derived the name for the constellation Ursa Major (Big Dipper), and the English adjective "ursine", meaning "bear-like". The French word for bear, "ours", is derived from the Latin. The ancient Greek word for bear is "arktos", from which is derived the star name "Arcturus", meaning "guardian of the bear" (from its position behind the tail of the bear constellation Ursa Major), and the adjective and noun "arctic", meaning "north", again a reference to the northern constellation of the bear. The Sanskrit word for bear is "rkshas" (in ASCII transliteration; the "r" being pronounced more like a vowel than a consonant). Old Celtic had a similar bear word (*arto-), from which the Welsh word "arth" and the name "Arthur" are derived.
From these words in four separate branches of Indo-European (Italic, Greek, Indic, and Celtic), linguists have reconstructed the PIE word for bear as *rktho-, *rkto-, *rkso-, or *rtko-. An asterisk simply marks a word as being a hypothetical reconstruction. The alternative forms show that the reconstruction of Indo-European root words is not always an exact science.
In recent pre-historical and early historical times, bears are thought to have been more common in northern than in southern climes. The southern Indo-European tongues retain the old PIE word for bear, but different words for bear appear in the northern PIE language groups, like Germanic (which includes English, German, Dutch, and Swedish), Slavic (which includes Russian, Polish, and Czech), and Baltic (including Lithuanian, Latvian, and Old Prussian).
We know the common English word "bear" and its less common variant "bruin" (from Dutch "bruin", meaning brown. French "brun" and "brunette", also signify the color brown, though the French word for bear is, as we saw above, "ours"). The Dutch word for bear is "beer". In German, the word for bear is "baer" (now spelled "bär" with a-umlaut). In Old Norse, and its descendants Danish and Swedish, the corresponding bear word is "bjorn". These words appear in personal and family names and also in place names in Germanic speaking lands, for example "Berlin" in Prussia, "Berne" in Switzerland, "Brno" (German "Brunn") in Moravia in the former Czechoslovakia. All these words are derived from the PIE word *bher- = "brown". The Germanic speaking peoples, who inhabited and hunted in northern climes and were presumably in frequent contact with the bear, did not use its common name. Instead, they used a circumlocution: "the brown one", and this is reflected in the modern word for bear in all the Germanic languages. Linguists hypothesize that in old common Germanic, the true name of the bear was under a taboo -- not to be spoken directly. The exact details of the taboo are not known. Did it apply to hunters who were hunting the bear and did not want to warn it? Or to hunters hunting other animals and did not wanting to rile up the bear and have it steal their prey? Or did it apply to anyone who did not want to summon the bear by its name and perhaps become its prey? Whatever the details, the taboo worked so well that no trace of the original *rkto- word remains in Germanic languages, except as borrowed historically in learned words from Greek or Latin. The Greeks and Romans apparently had a more laid-back relationship with the bear, perhaps because there were relatively few encounters, and preserved the ancient name.
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