Re: Germanic 'bear'

From: Rick McCallister
Message: 68810
Date: 2012-03-07

Not that you need my help, but in Nawat, usulu-t "jaguar" is usually replaced by te-kwa-ni "people eater" < te- (personal object pronoun) + kwa "eat" + -ni "habitual, doer" --so the precedent is there and your logic seems impeccable to me

From: Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 6, 2012 4:32 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Germanic 'bear'

 
W dniu 2012-03-05 23:06, Tavi pisze:

> If I understood you well, you said Germanic "replaced" the inherited IE
> word by another one, is that right? Well, I think it was rather the
> other way around, that is, it was the IE word which didn't "catch" in
> Germanic.

I didn't say anything like that. I said that Baltic and Slavic used
deescriptive epithets instead of the inherited 'bear' word. What likely
happened in Germanic was the replacement of the inherited word for
'bear' by the equally inherited but less specific word meaning 'wild beast'.

Piotr