explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

2381: The True Name of the Bear

2020-11-06T01:02:32Z

141.101.68.66: Bears spying on humans locking their food stores is BS.

{{comic
| number = 2381
| date = November 4, 2020
| title = The True Name of the Bear
| image = the_true_name_of_the_bear.png
| titletext = Thank you to Gretchen McCulloch for fielding this question, and sorry that as a result the world's foremost internet linguist has been devoured by the brown one. She will be missed.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by THE BEAR WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED. Sir, madam, or variation thereupon under the username Gbisaga, your linguistic speculations are honestly interesting. However, they’re original research. Please find a citation. Another Reader says: Now, I thought the point here was to explain the comic, not be encyclopedic, no? Randall discusses a lot of obscurely known things that don't have good citations available (mostly regarding STEM culture). Not true for etymology I suppose. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

The Canadian Internet linguist {{w|Gretchen McCulloch}} [https://twitter.com/gretchenamcc/status/1113195661275611137 tweeted] about [https://www.charlierussellbears.com/LinguisticArchaeology.html the theory] that the word for bear became taboo in some branches of Indoeuropean languages - notably the Germanic one - and it was replaced by euphemisms. In the Germanic branch, the euphemism may have been like "the brown one" and words for bear derive from words for "brown".

The Indoeuropean root for bear is *rkto-, which has been inferred from languages that use words derived from it. In the comic, Gretchen McCulloch applies {{w|Sound change|sound shifting}} laws to it to guess how it would have evolved into English, but pronouncing it seems to actually summon a bear, showing that abandoning that word was a fairly wise move for the Germanic language family. Interestingly enough, the hypothesized word “arth” is the same as the Welsh and Cornish for the word “bear.” Welsh belongs to the Celtic language family, which is one of the Indoeuropean branches that still uses a word derived from *rkto-, as the Italic (Romance), Greek and Indoarian (Sanscrit) branches do, while Germanic, Slavic and Baltic branches abandoned it for different euphemisms.

Depending on how one takes the concept of " saying a true name", there may be a consistency problem with the comic, adding to the absurdity of the situation depicted. If saying the "true" name (or any name derived from that name) summons the bear, how is it that the Welsh and most Romance language speakers (e.g. Italians saying Orso, Spaniards saying Oso, etc) get away without being constantly mauled? One explanation might be if the bears only respond to certain languages, but that seems unlikely unless the words mutated specifically into some special sound bears responded to, since the languages that the bears would be prompted by would have developed thousands of years apart in time. An arcane form of {{w|geofencing}}, and/or a {{w|geas}} firmly tied to some prior mystically-established meta-contextualising, might limit such otherworldly 'magic' and explain why more mundane science and logic is usually unworried by these kinds of phenomena being inadvertently triggered.

A view on speaking of bears that is much more likely, is that the cultures were such that when other human beings heard the clear word for bear, they would behave in ways that people did not desire. For example, maybe when someone had a good harvest bears would have a tendency to come into town to investigate or raid their food store. After some time, people might have developed a tendency to discuss bears and lock up their food store after a good harvest, and so if people overheard discussion of bears from their neighbors, they might have all locked down their food stores, and the bears could have learned to key in on the behavior of everyone locking their food stores to actually come into the city and raid them more in response.{{Citation needed}} There are a lot of rational reasons{{Citation needed}} that avoiding speaking of bears to keep them away could have been a real thing that actually worked.

Another possibility is that the "true name" of a bear is actually in a language the bear understands: possibly involving smells, body language, territorial or ecological interspecies behavior, and would actually reliably summon a bear because the person using it knew exactly what they were doing. Hunter-gatherers and very experienced trackers are known to interact with wildlife in such ways.{{Citation needed}}

Use of true names appears to be [[1013: Wake Up Sheeple|highly effective in the xkcd universe, rather like a fairy tale]], and it is also [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IKnowYourTrueName a common trope] elsewhere. Some say a true name contains clear meaning of who someone or something really is. In a competitive culture like ours, this could give others power over you, "profiling" you to be able to predict you and what you do.

Internet Linguist Gretchen McCulloch (or her ghost) certainly found it effective, but https://twitter.com/GretchenAMcC/status/1324044826145378304 may reflect her extreme susceptibility to internet leakage.

=== Trivia ===

The last comic strip that ended with the words "Oh no" was [[2314: Carcinization]], which also featured an unfortunate occurrence involving an animal as its punchline when Cueball spontaneously transformed into a crab.

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

:[Megan walks in front the left, looking down at her phone. Cueball and Ponytail are standing next to each other.]
:Megan: Wow - according to the internet, we don't know the true name of the bear.
:Cueball: What?

:[Gretchen comes on-panel from the right.]
:Megan: Apparently there was a superstition that saying its name would summon it. "Bear" and "bruin" mean "the brown one." Its actual name has been lost.
:Cueball: Wow.
:Ponytail: Gretchen, is this for real?

:[Zoom-in on Gretchen.]
:Gretchen: Well, sort of
:Gretchen: The Proto-Indo-European root was *rkto-
:Gretchen: It was lost in the Germanic languages like English, but survived elsewhere, e.g. Greek "arktos" and Latin "ursus"

:[Back to the second panel, with Megan holding her phone down, Ponytail with her hands in the air, and Gretchen with his hand on his chin.]
:Megan: So could we figure out what the word would have been in English?
:Gretchen: Hmm. I mean, we'll never know, but given Germanic sound shifts, a reasonable guess might be "arth"?
:Ponytail: ''No!!''

:[The panel zooms in again to Gretchen.]
:Ponytail (off-panel): ''Stop! AAAAA!''
:Gretchen: What??
:Ponytail (off-panel): Don't ''say'' it!

:[Ponytail is holding her palms out. Megan is no longer in the panel.]
:Ponytail: What have you ''done''?
:Off-panel noise: <big>'''''ROAR'''''</big>
:Gretchen: Oh
:Gretchen: Oh no

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]
[[Category:Comics featuring real people]]
[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Animals]]

Talk:2381: The True Name of the Bear

2020-11-06T00:53:35Z

141.101.68.66: Other languages' summoning.

This one is ridiculously early. [[Special:Contributions/172.69.22.120|172.69.22.120]] 05:22, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

Let’s try this again, hopefully won’t get stepped on this time... I know I’ve seen Gretchen on various YouTube channels but is she really “the world's foremost internet linguist” as Randal claims?[[Special:Contributions/162.158.79.87|162.158.79.87]] 05:29, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
:Probably as a linguist studying internet culture, which she is indeed one of the most famous in that area. Most popular linguist on the internet? It's everyone's guess.
:From Randall Munroe to Tom Scott... how much more proof do you need? Or is it a conspiracy theory waiting to happen? [[Special:Contributions/162.158.74.143|162.158.74.143]] 16:34, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
Well, after being mentioned by Randall she totally might become the most known one.

"Arth" is Welsh for bear.

Hmm... I find Ponytail's behaviour strange. At first she asks for explanation/verification of Megan's claim and when she recieves it she yells "NO!" as if she already knew it would be true... [[User:Elektrizikekswerk|Elektrizikekswerk]] ([[User talk:Elektrizikekswerk|talk]]) 09:14, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
:She gets confirmation that the name is lost in panel 3 (and assumes it also confirms the summoning part). So she indeed knew by panel 4.[[Special:Contributions/141.101.68.66|141.101.68.66]] 10:51, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
:: Why isn't the bear's name summoning it after its name being said out loud in panel 3, though? Or is the name only "true" in English (in which the name didn't exist until Gretchen reconstructed it)? Doesn't make sense. /edit: I know we are talking about myths and superstition here and thus it might be all somewhat hazy but this comic is imho not self-consistent. I'm not used to inconsistent comics on XKCD (unless it's done on purpose for humorous effect which in this case seems not to be true). Thus my irritation. [[User:Elektrizikekswerk|Elektrizikekswerk]] ([[User talk:Elektrizikekswerk|talk]]) 11:13, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
:::They are clearly in England (or the Anglosphere in general, though English isn't the official language in the US, merely customary) and by the Rules Of Summoning an English/etc 'bear' ''must'' only respond to the locality-sanctioned word (said with intent, not a coincidentally homophonic collection of syllables, not saying the exact same word but in the sense of being actually quoting a different language that uses the same word).
:::I theorise that the Welsh are saying ''their'' bear-name in slightly the wrong accent for being useful to summon a Welsh bear (maybe it should be more "Ardd"?) due to excessive Anglicisation. Or the Celtic way of not-saying-the-true-Celtic-word is to habitually say the Anglic one, which thus does not count. Or the Welsh bears are just confused by the current trend for dual-language signage and expect/require both. (Welsh then English in one half of the country, English followed by Welsh in the other part of the nation.) [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.208|141.101.98.208]] 12:55, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
:::If we're worried about consistency here, how is it that all the Romance language speakers (e.g. Orso for Italians, Oso for Spaniards, etc) get away without being constantly mauled? Perhaps it's only the *true* name of the bear, -rkto, that summons the animal. I suppose that would give an explanation of why we don't see any Indo-European speakers around nowadays... [[User:Gbisaga|Gbisaga]] ([[User talk:Gbisaga|talk]]) 13:37, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
:::*NOTE* I've added an explanation that attempts to summarize this consistency discussion. But somebody reverted it. Why? It doesn't seem out of line, compared to a lot of what I read on explainxkcd. [[User:Gbisaga|Gbisaga]] ([[User talk:Gbisaga|talk]]) 14:29, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

:: It need not be so complicated. Perhaps there is only 1 ur-bear (ha ha) that can teleport when it hears the magic word. If the magic word is said many times every day in Wales, that ur-bear would be exhausted by teleportation and only rarely does saying the name cause it to do so. Whereas in English, the first time in years it has been summoned is in this comic, so of course it comes. [[User:JohnHawkinson|JohnHawkinson]] ([[User talk:JohnHawkinson|talk]]) 19:54, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
: Or simply the summoning only works when the true name is said in the currently spoken language (English), not as a foreign word. And consistency on how it works or doesn't work in other languages is really really overthinking, as this comics is not about other languages and says nothing on summoning technicalities.[[Special:Contributions/141.101.68.66|141.101.68.66]] 00:53, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

Fascinating! In Russian, the word for bear is also euphemistic, pronounced as ''medved'', which roughly means "knowledgeable about honey". But until today, I thought that something like "ber" is in fact its true name. Turns out it's not even that. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.238.236|162.158.238.236]] 14:02, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
: Actually, ''medved'' is 'honey-eater', see these two links (in Russian) https://pikabu.ru/story/kto_krayniy_za_medvedem_fenomen_tabu_v_lingvistike_5812897 and https://pikabu.ru/story/kak_rabotaet_istoricheskaya_lingvistika2_v_berloge_yetimologa_5817400 [[Special:Contributions/162.158.183.205|162.158.183.205]] 16:14, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
:I've just been down a Wikipedia rabbit-hole, because of this information, to try to work out why I don't remember it being reported that Medvedev had resigned and replaced by Mishustin. (Or replaced ''with'' him, wherever he emerged from, ''by'' Putin, to be strictly accurate.). Probably we were more concerned about the Constitutional changes, then 'other things' hit the headlines. Not comic-related, but thank you for enlightening me on both linguistic and (as a side-effect) political subjects. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.158.26|162.158.158.26]] 16:39, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

: What were the linguistic speculations that the header mentioned? Even if there's no source, they shouldn't be removed.

I thought the reconstruction was *rtkos, not *rktos? Wikipedia agrees: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/h₂ŕ̥tḱos [[Special:Contributions/162.158.183.205|162.158.183.205]] 16:14, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

I bet a dollar that the long-lost English word for "bear" was "Voldemort". [[Special:Contributions/108.162.215.242|108.162.215.242]] 01:03, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

: Oh-oh. You said it. This is why you need to create an account - you don't want people randomly summoning you by your true name "Mr/Ms 108.162.215.242" !! [[User:SteveBaker|SteveBaker]] ([[User talk:SteveBaker|talk]]) 17:48, 5 November 2020 (UTC) (Not my real name which is...oh wait...nearly got me there!)

In Finnish bear is karhu, which is also an euphemistic word meaning "the rough one". There are many other words for bear as well, such as kontio (one that walks slowly), nalle ("bear" in Swedish), mesikämmen (the nectar palm), metsän kuningas (the king of the forest), kouko/kouvo (some kind of ghost?), otava (this one would take way too long to explain) and finally oksi/ohto/otso, which likely is the true name. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.238.239|162.158.238.239]] 11:46, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

A safe name to avoid the name of something dangerous is known as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noa-name noa-name] [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noa (further reference)]. You find it also for the wolf, devil, god, leprechauns etc. [[Special:Contributions/162.158.154.215|162.158.154.215]] 20:51, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

The etymological joke might be on the comic writer - hrtkos might be itself a euphemism, cognate with a word in Sanskrit that meant "destroyer" - possibly "hive destroyer."
"''there is also a suggestion that the original PIE word for bear, *rkso- (or its variants) is itself descriptive, meaning "destroyer (perhaps of beehives)", because a cognate word in Sanskrit is "rakshas", meaning "harm, injury''""
Who really knows? Same source identifies the name in Lithuanian as a different euphemism - "the shaggy one." And wonders about a German, a Slav, and a Balt arguing about the best circumlocution while being careful not to slip up and make themselves an xkcd punchline. Anyway, it's a fun read: [https://charlierussellbears.com/LinguisticArchaeology.html] [[User:Jd2718|Jd2718]] ([[User talk:Jd2718|talk]]) 22:52, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

Talk:2381: The True Name of the Bear

2020-11-04T10:51:41Z

141.101.68.66: Ponytail's behaviour