Editing 2381: The True Name of the Bear

{{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. 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 Indo-European languages - notably the Germanic one - and it was replaced by euphemisms. In the Germanic branch, the euphemism may have been "the brown one," and thus the modern word "bear" (derived from Germanic "beran") would more literally translate into the color "brown" rather than the animal.

The Indoeuropean root for bear is *rkto-, which has been inferred from modern languages that still use a word derived from it. In the comic, McCulloch applies {{w|Sound change|sound shifting}} laws to it to guess how it would have evolved in English had it not been superceded, but saying it seems to actually summon a bear, showing that abandoning that word was a fairly wise move for the Germanic language family.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 Indo-European branches that still uses a word derived from *rkto-, as do the Italic (Romance), Greek and Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) branches, while Germanic, Slavic and Baltic branches abandoned it for different euphemisms.

Depending on how one takes the concept of "saying a true name", {{tvtropes|FridgeLogic|fridge logic}} issues arise with this 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 do Celtic and Romance language speakers (e.g. Italians saying Orso, Spaniards saying Oso, etc) get away with saying it without running into the same issue? Perhaps 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.{{Citation needed}}

Joking aside, there can be actual good reason to avoid saying bear. 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 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}} Thus in a roundabout way, mentioning bears does summon bears.

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}} <!-- I don't have a citation for this (although I'd start by looking in https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Science_and_Art_of_Tracking/bvJJAAAAYAAJ maybe), but I believed my tracking instructor telling it to me when I saw a photograph of him with a chickadee sitting on his finger.  -->

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 {{tvtropes|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 her hand on her 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]]
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[[Category:Language]]
[[Category:Animals]]