A strange human custom which is found all over the world is the hunter's taboo. When hunting large, dangerous animals like bears primitive peoples refer to them poetically: bear in Slavic is "honey eater", Baltic "the licker", Germanic "the brown one" https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/410287 …
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Replying to @crimkadid
pretty sure this is nonsense. It's a ubiquitous naming scheme for all kinds of things like woodpecker, honeyguide, stinging nettle, etc
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Replying to @drethelin @crimkadid
I think the idea is that you compare mother tongues and see words that have been replaced vs invented(e.g. there was a word in PIE for 'bear' that was replaced like this. but other PIE words like 'wheel' have not been so replaced. and 'woodpecker' etc don't have PIE root at all)
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Mediterraneans and Indians were aware of bears in the same sense North Europeans were aware of lions, but they didn’t hunt them because they didn’t exist in those areas.
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Or to be precise I suppose, their numbers were not high enough that the average person had any experience of bear hunting, which was not the case in the northern fringes of Europe
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