dedusmulntxt

muln

@dedusmulntxt

dedus muln

  • he him

night of the living bathroom

art tag is #dedusdraws

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dedusmulntxt
@dedusmulntxt
banana-interface
@banana-interface
banana-interface
@banana-interface

Etymology rambles: start!

I've became interested in etymology and have a lot of fun little facts to share.

Disclaimer that I'm not a linguist and I'm just someone who read too many wiktionary entries

My native language is Russian, and I'm slowly learning some Polish - so the rambles are going to be about these two, or sometimes also about English and its relatives.

  1. Proto-Slavic had a word "*praščurъ", which meant "ancestor". Both Russian and Polish retained this word in the same meaning - "пращур"/"praszczur", but in Polish the word is pretty antiquated.

The fun comes from under the floor (where the rats live) - the Polish name for a rat is "szczur", which happens to match the above mentioned root. For the context, the prefix "pra-" has the same meaning as "grand" in "grand dad";

And so a Polish speaker who doesn't know of the antiquated meaning the word "praszczur" would hear it like "grand rat".

  1. The Russian (and generally Slavic) word for a bear is "медведь", which is colloquially has been disassembled into "мёд" (honey) and "ведь" ("to know" in this context, from "ведать" - "to be aware of"). So "honey-knower".

However, if you take a step back, you'll find out that initially the word was formed as "honey-eater" - not from *medъ and *věděti, but from *jěsti instead.

This etymology is further clouded in Polish, where there happened a shift from 'm' into 'n' in this word - "niedźwiedź". Honey remains with an 'm': "miód".

As an aside, in modern Russian the word would be constructed as "медоед" [medoed] - which is how the honey badger is currently called.

dedusmulntxt
@dedusmulntxt

кур in russian - chicken in plural accusative
кур in bulgarian - cock (penis)

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in reply to @banana-interface's post:

modulusshift
@modulusshift

What’s fun is that “honey eater” seems to be part of a tradition across all of Northern Europe to make the original name of the bear taboo. “Bear” itself is an old word meaning “brown one”, other languages have words like “sticky paw”. The original name survives in Southern European and Indo-Iranian names for the bear, such as ursus in Latin, arctos in Greek, rksa in Sanskrit. This word seems to mean “destroyer”. That’s a little interesting, because you wouldn’t expect an animal name to have a derivation like that. Could be that this name is the result of an even earlier taboo.

Anyway I’d also like to point out that we’ve named the planet’s poles Arctic “the bear one” and Antarctic “on the other side from the bears”. Thanks, Greeks lol

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banana-interface
@banana-interface

Yup, I didn't touch on the other bear names, that's also a good topic. From wiktionary article on *medvědь:

Similar proposed examples of linguistic taboo for 'bear' are Proto-Germanic *berô (“the brown one”), Latvian lācis (“stomper, pounder”), Sanskrit भल्ल (bhalla, "auspicious, favourable") and Old Irish math (“the good one”).

Really curious that this is the animal whose name everyone thought should be a taboo. The cycles of "a word is taboo -> it becomes unused -> the word-replacement becomes the default word -> new word is also taboo" are definitely a thing, this happened a lot to genital-related words in English in recent centuries. Always curious how this works and propagates.

And I've never realized the connection between bears and Arctic!

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