ONE OLD NAME, THREE FATES

What do you call the animal you must not name?

Romanian urs continues Latin ursus. English and German came to bear and Bär, Russian to medved', and Finnish has a whole collection of workaround names. One explanation is an old hunters' taboo — but the story is more complicated than the legend.

See the word we kept

URS < URSUS: Romanian continues Latin, as DEX records
MEDVED' = HONEY + TO EAT: the Russian name, spelled out
DIES AND RISES: the New Year bear of Moldova

Jocul ursului: furred troupes at New Year. Photo: Slaythehousebootsdownfrog, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The root linguists reconstruct:

*h₂ŕ̥tḱos

the reconstructed form, “bear” in Proto-Indo-European

INHERITED the branches that kept it
REPLACED the branches that changed it
PARALLEL Finnish, on its own account

What the dictionaries say

The word we kept

Romanian urs continues Latin ursus directly, and lup continues lupus. The words are inherited from Latin; we find them in writing, among other places, in Coresi's Evanghelie cu învățătură, printed at Brașov in 1581.

URS n.

– Lat. ursus (DEX '09)

CORESI, EV. 447

See in DEX

LUP n.

ml lupus (MDA2)

CORESI, EV. 195/24

See in DEX

The wolf earns one line: another animal name inherited from Latin, a fine parallel for urs — not proof of its etymology.

DEX cites the Cazania from the Pușcariu–Procopovici edition (CC2); the note in RRL 4/2023 confirms the imprint: Brașov, 1581.

The First Romanian School at Șcheii Brașovului — Coresi's town. Photo: Andrei kokelburg, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 RO

The Lupa Capitolina, the she-wolf with Romulus and Remus — The Lupa Capitolina: Rome's she-wolf. Lup is Latin too. Photo: Wilfredor, Wikimedia Commons, CC0

Three fates

Inherited, replaced, parallel

The same ancient animal, three ways of carrying his name forward. Open each branch: the family, the form, the meaning — and how sure each step is.

The Indo-European word survived in several branches — Romanian is one of them, not the only one.

urs ← ursus · Romanian
Romanian continues the Latin directly.
orso · oso · ours · urso
Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese — all from ursus too (Portuguese urso is a learned borrowing).
árktos · Ancient Greek
The bear — and the name of the northern constellation, whence Arctic (see below).
*artos → arth, Artio · Celtic
Welsh arth and the goddess Artio's name, from Gaulish arto-, “bear”.

urs: DEX · ursus and the Romance descendants (Wiktionary) · *artos (Wiktionary, after Matasović)

Two Indo-European branches lost the old word and replaced it. The new forms are facts; the motive is hypothesis.

*berô → bear, Bär · Germanic
The traditional account: “the brown one” — Germans call him “der Braune”. But the etymology is disputed: Ringe proposes a word for “wild animal”.DISPUTED
bera, not beran · Old English
The noun bera (“bear”) and the verb beran (“to bear”) are different roots.
*medvědь → medved' · Slavic
“The honey-eater”, from honey + to eat — solid morphology. That hunters named him so out of taboo stays hypothesis.HYPOTHESIS

bear: Etymonline · Bär: DWDS · медведь: Vasmer · Wacewicz-Chorosz 2023 (study, PDF)

The first folio of Beowulf, in Old English — Beowulf, first folio: Old English, the language of bera. Photo: anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

The first page of the Abrogans (Codex Sangallensis 911) — The Abrogans (Codex Sangallensis 911): Latin with Old High German glosses. Photo: Unknown, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Honeycomb with honey — Honeycomb: the sweet half of the Russian name. Photo: Vyacheslav Argenberg, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0

Finnish is Uralic, not Indo-European: it had no old word to replace. But it invented its own workarounds — the same cultural strategy, another family.

karhu
“Rough” (karhea, like the fur) or a term of endearment — debated. Either way, a newer euphemism than old otso.DISPUTED
mesikämmen
mesi “honey” + kämmen “palm”. “Honey-paw” is a literary rendering, not the exact gloss.
metsän ukko · metsän kuningas · otso
“The old man of the forest”, “the (golden) king of the forest” and the old poetic name.

karhu (Wiktionary) · mesikämmen (Wiktionary) · The Bear and the Year (MAA) · Finnish, a Uralic language (Wikipedia)

Celebration After a Bear Hunt, by Gallen-Kallela, for Seven Brothers — “Celebration After a Bear Hunt”, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, for Seven Brothers. Photo: Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Name the bear

Four rounds, four ruses. Choose how you would name him, then see who named him the same way.

1 Colour
The hunters will not speak his name. You point at his colour — what do you call him?
2 Appetite
You name him after what he eats — what do you call him?
3 Kinship
You coax him like an old relative — what do you call him?
4 Title
You give him a title, to keep him at a distance — what do you call him?

Score: 0 of 4 attested

The game options are invented; the attested names are the ones in the verdicts, with their sources.

What the neighbours called him

The strategies and the attested names, in brief.

What the neighbours called him
Ruse	Name	Who chose it
Colour	the brown one (traditional account, disputed)	the Germans and the English: bear, Bär
Appetite	the honey-eater (solid morphology; the motive, hypothesis)	the Russians: medved'
Kinship	the old man of the forest (separate Uralic tradition)	the Finns: metsän ukko
Title	the king of the forest (separate Uralic tradition)	the Finns: metsän kuningas

Why rename him?

The replacement forms are observable facts: bear, Bär and medved' exist, with their etymologies. “Hunters' taboo” is the famous explanation: people would have walked around saying the name, out of fear. The motive itself cannot be directly observed — it stays a linguists' hypothesis.

HYPOTHESIS

And for Germanic, not even the meaning is settled: others connect the word with Latin ferus, “wild”, and Ringe proposes an Indo-European root for “wild animal” — hence the DISPUTED badge above.

Why he mattered so much

The ritual

These three stops prove nothing about where the words come from. They show how far the bear could reach beyond the status of a mere animal: Athens, Muri, Moldova.

The bear-girls of Brauron

At Brauron, Athenian girls served Artemis as arktoi — she-bears — in saffron robes, with sacred dances, races and sacrifice; the procession set out from the Acropolis, and the Arkteia was held every four years. What the rite meant exactly is debated: ages vary by source, and the running is read now as a race, now as a hunt — Scanlon's reading (2002), from thirty-four vases.

“Shedding my saffron robe I was an arktos (bear) at the Brauronia.”
Aristophanes, Lysistrata, lines 641–647 (about ten years old)

The Brauron sanctuary with the temple of Artemis — The sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron, with the church of Saint George. Photo: C messier, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Saffron flowers — Saffron (Crocus sativus): the colour of the Arkteia robes. Photo: Emilie40, Wikimedia Commons, CC0

A bust of Aristophanes — Aristophanes, a bust in the Uffizi: the poet who kept the testimony. Photo: Alexander Mayatsky, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The goddess with the bear at Muri

Near Bern, a Gallo-Roman bronze shows a seated goddess face to face with a bear, which seems to hold fruit. The base carries the dedication: Deae Artioni / Licinia Sabinilla — “To the goddess Artio, from Licinia Sabinilla” (CIL 13, 05160). The group is now in the Historical Museum of Bern, which gave it a monograph (Kaufmann-Heinimann 2002). And the goddess's name is part of the story: Artio comes from Gaulish arto-, “bear”, of the same family as Greek arktos and Latin ursus — the ritual object is proof that the old word survived.

*h₂ŕ̥tḱos árktos ursus *artos Artio

The goddess Artio seated, face to face with the bear — a Gallo-Roman bronze — The goddess Artio, the Muri group: a Gallo-Roman bronze. Photo: Sandstein, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0

The bear that dies and rises

At Comănești and Dărmănești, at New Year, the bear troupes dance through the streets: the bear dies and rises, falls into hibernation and is woken. We are reading ethnography, not biology.

A dancer in a bearskin, close up — Jocul ursului up close: fur, mask, step. Photo: Slaythehousebootsdownfrog, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The word that stayed

Romanian got urs from Latin. Greek and the Celtic languages kept other kin of the same ancient name. The Germanic and Slavic branches replaced it. And further north, the Finns invented their own workarounds. Sometimes an animal's history fits less in a single name than in all the names people dared — or did not dare — to give it.

From names to living bears: “Is there an alternative to shooting Romania's bears?” — the companion piece on what to do with Romania's bears.

Sources

Dictionaries first, then etymologies and ritual. Every risky claim points at its source.

Dictionaries

Etymologies

Ritual

Print

Coresi, Brașov 1581: RRL 4/2023 (PDF)

Type: Fraunces, Newsreader and Atkinson Hyperlegible, under the SIL Open Font Licence.