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only_for_browsing t1_j6h19t2 wrote

Reply to comment by 445nm in 🔥 A Polar Bear following photographer Paul Souders from under the ice. by W0lfsKitten

Fun fact, the original word for bear is lost because people were so afraid that if you said it a bear would show up and eat you, so they used the word that eventually morphed into bear as a euphemism

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hehehuh t1_j6hh0nu wrote

It's not really lost, I think. Some languages still use it, for example ursus in Latin is afaik closely related to the original Germanic word. But indeed bear is derived from the word brown

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only_for_browsing t1_j6hjbkq wrote

I'm going off my brother who is almost worryingly obsessed with bears. Apparently ursa and other bear words all came from proto Indo European and all are not the original word for bear, which is lost, because of the fear. He could definitely be wrong but that's how he tells it

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