Publication details
Indo-European „bear“
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In the contribution the designations of “bear” are collected in all Indo-European branches, where they are known, to analyze them from the point of view of their internal phonological and morphological structure, semantic motivation, and etymology. The terms with more or less transparent semantic motivation can help with interpretation of less transparent terms. It seems, the most frequent semantic pattern in designation of “bear” in Western Eurasia is motivated by a more than positive relation of the bear to honey. This idea is applied to the most wide-spread Indo-European term for “bear”, reconstructible as *H2rtk´o- or *H2rdk´o- and whose traces are recognizible even in branches, where the dominant term was replaced by innovations. |
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