In place of a real entry today, a small piece of Russian etymology:
The word for bear in Russian is 'medvyed' (roughly), which comes from the word for honey (myod) and an old word for 'to know' (vyedat). Fine--we've all seen Winnie the Pooh. But why? It was an old Slavic superstition that to name a thing was to call its attention or call it to you, and so they used a euphemism to refer to something they certainly did not want to notice them.
I don't know if there are more words like this, but I hope so.
3 comments:
I love weird stuff like that.
You know, there's also a South American tribe that names people after objects (you, for instance, could be Rock). But you aren't allowed to use the names of your in-laws to refer to the object (so if you married my sister, I'd need a new word for rocks). So they borrow words from nearby languages as substitutes.
Wow. That's pretty good.
It's probably also a philological nightmare.
Well, they also have a weird thing about not marrying someone who has the same native language as you (there are, like, 3 or 4 tribes in a relatively small area), so you pretty much have to be bilingual.
I'm not sure if I could deal with the ever-changing vocabulary...or being named Tree.
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