fitzrove:fuckyeahdnd:fitzrove:calligrafiti:fidoruh:a-book-of-creatures:allthingslinguistic:There’s a

fitzrove:fuckyeahdnd:fitzrove:calligrafiti:fidoruh:a-book-of-creatures:allthingslinguistic:There’s a theory that early Europeans started saying “brown one” or “honey-eater” instead of “bear” to avoid summoning them, and similarly my friend has started calling Alexa “the faceless woman” because saying her true name awakens her from her slumberEnglish has an avoidance register used in the presence of certain respected animals, which sounds fancy until you realize it’s spelling out w-a-l-k and t-r-e-a-t in front of the dog.Mx. Leah Velleman on twitterIcelandic folklore requires you avoid saying the names of evil whales, otherwise you’ll draw their attention.Yall have evil whales? Yeah, Eric the White Beaked Whale’s a right bastard. This is the logic behind the etymology for the most common Finnish word for bear, ‘karhu’. That word refers to the animal’s coarse fur!Other euphemisms include honey-paw (mesikämmen), one-with-a-large-forehead (otso; also a common male first name), the apple/king of the forest, and a lot of archaic words idk how to translate (kontio, kouvo [only visible in place names like the city of Kouvola] and ohto). The suspected original word, oksi, is never used nowadays outside of folklore studies and linguistics.Hell yeah more secret Finnish bear names (I literally did not know that otso and otsa were related)I mean I’m riffing off of what my Finnish teacher told me in literature & mother tongue class, I could also be wrong!! :D Just sort of remember hearing that at the back of my mind…Oh dang, apparently the otsa-otso connection is a case of folk etymology so not entirely accurate. Apparently otso is derived from the proto-Finnic *okci, so it would actually be the closest descendant of the actual word for bear in Finnish. Apparently ohto is an old dialectal form of otso, so it means the same thing.All the other forbidden bear names you mentioned are accurate, since even philologists aren’t sure where the heck kontio and kouvo come from! The best guess for the former is that it’s a loan from a Sami language.My source for this is Wiktionary which is surprisingly detailed when it comes to providing etymologies for Finnish words, but its accuracy is occasionally suspect so do take all of the above with a grain of salt -- source link