The bear in Eurasian plant names: motivations and models

Abstract

Ethnolinguistic studies are important for understanding an ethnic group's ideas on the world, expressed in its language. Comparing corresponding aspects of such knowledge might help clarify problems of origin for certain concepts and words, e.g. whether they form common heritage, have an independent origin, are borrowings, or calques. The current study was conducted on the material in Slavonic, Baltic, Germanic, Romance, Finno-Ugrian, Turkic and Albanian languages. The bear was chosen as being a large, dangerous animal, important in traditional culture, whose name is widely reflected in folk plant names. The phytonyms for comparison were mostly obtained from dictionaries and other publications, and supplemented with data from databases, the co-authors' field data, and archival sources (dialect and folklore materials). More than 1200 phytonym use records (combinations of a local name and a meaning) for 364 plant and fungal taxa were recorded to help find out the reasoning behind bear-nomination in various languages, as well as differences and similarities between the patterns among them. Among the most common taxa with bear-related phytonyms were Arctostaphylos uva-ursi (L.) Spreng., Heracleum sphondylium L., Acanthus mollis L., and Allium ursinum L., with Latin loan translation contributing a high proportion of the phytonyms. Some plants have many and various bear-related phytonyms, while others have only one or two bear names. Features like form and/or surface generated the richest pool of names, while such features as colour seemed to provoke rather few associations with bears. The unevenness of bear phytonyms in the chosen languages was not related to the size of the language nor the present occurence of the Brown Bear in the region. However, this may, at least to certain extent, be related to the amount of the historical ethnolinguistic research done on the selected languages.

Keywords: Brown bear Ursus arctos; Ethnobotany; Ethnolinguistics; Latin calques; Motivation; Phytonyms; Traditional knowledge.

Fig. 1

Correspondences between the appearance of plants and animal body parts based on nomination (adapted from [4])

Fig. 2

Language groups reviewed in this publication and present geographic distribution of Brown Bear (Ursus arctos). Red – distribution of Brown Bear. Circles indicate the regions inhabited by the speakers of the language group very roughly. Base map (species distribution map) is created by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and distributed by Wikimedia according to Attribution-Share Alike Creative Commons License (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ursus_arctos_range_map.svg)

Fig. 3

Proportional division of motivations. Both motivations identified as the source and also hypothesized are counted here

Fig. 4

Relation between language groups and the number of recorded bear-phytonyms. names – the number of recorded bear-names. mean – the mean number of names within the language group