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ARCTIC BEAR

5/10/2017

1 Comment

 
Technically a "polar bear" would make more etymological sense if it was an "arctic bear". The word bear, meaning "a big carnivorous animal", comes from the Middle English term bere, from the Old English term bera, from the Proto-Germanic term bero. All of these end-vowel-switching words meant "bear", but their etymon, the Proto-Indo-European root bher, meant "brown", which proves that brown bears are also etymologically correct. But wait! People 8,000 years ago must have encountered bears too; why doesn't the current name stem from the PIE word for "bear" (which was hrtkos)? Well, the term mostly died out, to be replaced by this other, metynomic one, but it survived in Ancient Greek and Latin, as arktos and ursus, respectively. This former word was also later borrowed into Latin as arcticus, or "northern", since many bears lived in the north. Finally it went into English as arctic, with the definition we know today. How curious....
1 Comment
Suresh Chander
6/18/2021 02:34:20 pm

If you see the evolution of languages from the point of view of the oldest and mother of all languages Tamil the world would be astonished and would find its real roots. Arctic, Baltic, Nordic, and Celtic has similar endings certainly not without any reason. "Tic", "dic" refers to "dikku" a Tamil word meaning direction. Artic "Arc+dikku" means the direction towards the extreme north pole. Baltic (Vellai+ Dikku) means towards the white or snowy direction in Tamil. Celtic is also Keltic. In Tamil it is Keel+Dikku meaning southern part or lower direction. Similarly Nordic from the Nords,or Scandinavian direction.

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    Hello! I'm Adam Aleksic. I have a linguistics degree from Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote my thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy traveling, trivia, philosophy, board games, conlanging, and art history. 

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