My utterly unsubstantiated ramblings:

Not only the original word for 'bear' (related to
Latin 'Ursus') but also for 'wolf' (related to
Latin 'Lupus') were lost in Germanic apparently
to taboo-ifying (there's a fancy word for that
I've forgotten).

The idea is that people were so anxious about
encountering bears or wolves they avoided 'saying
the name of the beast lest he come' and used
monikers (bear being 'the brown one' and wolves
being 'the woofers' - ie, people imitated their
sound).

Something funny I noticed: In German *almost* no
nouns have declensive endings or alterations, but
the word 'bear' does. My idea is that this is
because the word bear developed for an adjective
('brown'). For this reason it still has some
slight adjective-like declension. That's not true
for the word wolf; however, "woof" is not
necessarilly a adjective.

In German *nouns* do not carry declensive changes
like in Norse. In Norse, a noun can change alot
depending on whether its in the nominative or
accusative case. In German, the noun v v rarely
changes at all in different cases, but any
articles and adjectives related to it do change
in generally the same way as they do for Norse.

Look at the comparison in Germany:

Hund (dog) is normal:
Der braune Hund sieht mich (the brown dog sees
me)
Ich sehe deN brauneN Hund (I see the brown dog)

>>The article and adjective 'the' and 'brown'

both change in the accusative case.

Baer is funny:
Der braune Baer sieht mich (the brown bear sees
me)
Ich sehen deN brauneN BaereN (i see the brown
bear)

>>Not only the article and adjective but also the

*noun itself* changes in the accusative case.

The word 'bear' modifies in the accusative (and
incidentally in all cases other than nominative)
just like it would if it were a weakly-declined
adjective instead of a noun. The modification is
not like adjectives otherwise (ie no nominative
or strong declination modification), but it seems
funny that some random word like 'bear' should
have adjective-like characteristics at all.

There are other words in Germany that modify like
this ('Customer'), but I dont' see that they are
necessarilly because the root is an adjective.

- DS

--- Haukur Thorgeirsson
<haukurth@...> wrote:

> > > The general word is 'bj�rn';
> > > thought to be derived from the same stem as
> 'brown'
> > > with the original IE-stem (lat. ursus)
> being lost
> > > due to a taboo.
> >
> > I'm subscribed to the digest, so this may
> have been
> > asked and answered, but I'm curious about the
> taboo
> > you mentioned. Can you describe more about
> this
> > or point me to some writings?
>
> Not really :-) My only source for this is
> �slensk
> or�sifjab�k by �sgeir Magn�sson. I didn't have
> it
> at hand when I wrote that and I don't have it
> now
> but I think he said "e.t.v. vegna bannhelgi;
> perhaps
> due to a taboo" (so my statement above is a
> notch
> too definite).
>
> I doubt anything is known for sure.
>
> Kve�ja,
> Haukur
>

=====
Kindest Regards,
- DeepStream
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