Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180319-are-lithuanians-obsessed-with-bees

by MiriamWeiner • 8 years ago

129 40 8 years ago

Anglo-saxon is, too: "beowulf" literally means "bee-hunter".

This ties into some cultic bear-worship tropes, too, which i believe also still persist, having to do with the fact that bears, like humans, have true names, and it is Not Wise/Not Possible to speak them -- thus the allusiory naming conventions.

scientician• 8 years ago

True names can be dangerous things, impossible to unspeak.

twic• 8 years ago

In the computers, i suppose an object's memory address is its true name, which is why we go to such great lengths to conceal it, with opaque handles, ASLR, etc.

jjtheblunt• 8 years ago

Citation for the claim that "beowulf" is "bee-hunter" ?

I'd learned from a graduate school course in germanic linguistics it was likely bear-wolf...but i'm curious where you got your claim.

stochastic_monk• 8 years ago

According to Wikipedia [0], Bee-Hunter is one of several competing etymologies, additionally including Bee-Wolf, Bear-Hunter, Thor-wolf, Beow-wolf, and Woodpecker.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_(hero)

drb91• 8 years ago

Correct. “Bear” actually derives from the word for “brown” (aka “the brown one”) rather that the PIE <asterisk>rkto- — think “ursus”. In facr, all germanic words derived from <asterisk>rkto- appear to be loan words from romance language (eg arctic).

Seems like the slavic version is roughly equivalent to “honey eater”.

Personally I’ve always thought this is because bears can both stand on two legs and roughly share a diet with humans. :)

lokopodium• 8 years ago

Funnily, Old Slavic for bear is бер, cognate to bear. However, this word became taboo too.

pimlottc• 8 years ago

Atlas Obscura just had a nice article on this. "Wolf" is another example.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-does-dagnabbit-me...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

benbreen• 8 years ago

I've been making my way through David Anthony's The Horse, the Wheel and Language (really well-written book if anyone is interested, btw) and the thing about Proto-Indo-Europeans having some kind of religious taboo against naming bears is one of my favorite theories in it. I've been trying to learn Farsi and have some Latin, and it has been a lot of fun finding the points of origin in the really ancient words (Farsi word for bear is khers, which I assume is etymologically linked to ursus.)

I just dug into the topic a bit more and came across the theory that King Arthur's name means "bear king" - fun correlate with the "Bee Warrior" mentioned above :)

From Wikipedia: "Another possibility is that it is derived from a Brittonic patronym Arto-rīg-ios (the root of which, arto-rīg- 'bear-king' is to be found in the Old Irish personal name Art-ri)."

aquadrop2• 8 years ago

I think slavic version is "the one who knows where the honey is" or "the one who controls the honey"

henrikschroder3• 8 years ago

Noa-names are fascinating, the flipside to true names being taboo, because they would summon the thing.

Indo-european had a word for bear, but it's completely eradicated in germanic languages, and replaced with the noa-name: Bear. The brown one. The original rtko/arktos/ursus never made it.

Wolf works the same way in Swedish, the common word is "varg", which is a noa-name meaning cattle-killer. Ulv, derived from ulfr/wulf/vlk exists and means the same thing, but it's archaic.

portofcall3• 8 years ago

I’ve never heard of a noa-name, and my attempts to Google frustratingly return only meanings of the name Noa. Do you have any good starting points for me to learn about this? It’s so very up my alley, and I’d love to learn more.

Broken_Hippo• 8 years ago

"Ulv, derived from ulfr/wulf/vlk exists and means the same thing, but it's archaic."

Though it might be archaic in Swedish, but it is also the Norwegian word for wolf. I'd guess that it is really easy to adapt the archaic Swedish word if the person has lived or spent a lot of time in Norway.

w0land• 8 years ago

Interesting. Albanian here, your examples in our language are:

Bear: Ari Wolf: Ujk

OrganicMSG• 8 years ago

Ahh, of course, Lithuanian is probably where one of the human group consciousnesses keeps the convolutional network it uses for recognising stuff about bees.

zbentley• 8 years ago

Would it be possible to update the title to match the one on the article?

dzhiurgis• 8 years ago

Lithuanian here - first time I hear about this. I certainly noticed bee-keepers seem to have rather intimate relationship with bees - I always found it rather interesting, but that's not limited to Lithuanians.

I'd be nice if author list more words than single one (bičiulis). The other example is a bit incorrect - yes we do have different words for dead animal (dvėsti) and dead human (mirti), but each can be used opposite - if your beloved died you'd rather use "miręs" or if you curse at someone you'd tell them to "dvėsk".

rmind• 8 years ago

In fact, we have more words for death. For example, "stipti" or "gaišti" ("šuo nugaišo" - "the dog has died"). However, it is true that people say "bitė mirė" -- the human death, rather than the animal.

wruza• 8 years ago

Probably any less-than-english represented group felt that way after reading articles about themselves. A single, very local traditional nuance can be grown into something fundamental or strong enough about the entire group, equipped with vague “facts”. Not that it harms much or is rude, or even wrong, cause we often don’t know our history. But I always have mixed feelings reading something like that about my group[s].

“There is an ethnic nationalist movement among Kazan Tatars that stresses descent from the Bulgars and is known as Bulgarism – there have been graffiti on the walls in the streets of Kazan with phrases such as "Bulgaria is alive" (Булгария жива)” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatars

Born in Kazan, I never seen or heard of such movement, acts or news. Yeah, 118 people of 0.5M (blind guess) defined themselves as bulgars in 1989. But no one except themselves was aware of this “nationalist movement” since then. And no one tries to understand the real meaning of that graffiti, because our teenagers are often into something strange or schizophrenic-flavoured in their street paintings. But I bet this will hit headlines at the day when some erudite politician will see a good profit from it. And people will “oh no, national extremists among tatars!”

I wonder how much of a history was written that way.

Mediterraneo102• 8 years ago

The debate over how much Volga Tatars should be seen as descendants of the Volga Bulgars and how much they should be seen as descendants of the Golden Horde, is something that will come up loudly at any academic conference on ethnography or linguistics in Tatarstan. Virtually everyone agrees that the modern Tatar people are mostly descendents of the Volga Bulgars (or Udmurts) who lived there before 1236, they just switched fron speaking Volga Bulgarian (or Udmurt) to Kipchak. But Tatar intellectuals can get oddly insistent about which aspect of Tatars' history should be emphasized more.

buovjaga• 8 years ago

The bee obsession has its roots in shamanism. An example is the two bee-headed figures in Tassili rock art: http://samorini.it/site/archeologia/africa/funghi-allucinoge... found in In-Aouanrhat and Ti-n-Tarin.

This has a different photo of the painting in In-Aouanrhat: https://blogs.harvard.edu/houghton/2015/09/10/spirit-of-the-...

The Roundhead style rock art that these belong to dates from about 9000 BP to about 6600 BP.

This has more about the sacredness of the bee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_(mythology) Yet, it is lacking a lot of stuff, including how bees appear in Finnish epic poetry.

fyfy18• 8 years ago

Another interesting part of the language are the names of the months. They aren’t derived from Latin; each has a cultural significance for that time of year.

https://letyourlanguagespeak.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/twelve...

BerislavLopac• 8 years ago

That is not limited to Lithuanian, Croatian has "native" month names too, with "Latin" ones used in dialects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_months

LfLxfxxLxfxx• 8 years ago

Baltic and Slavic languages are related.

vilius• 8 years ago

“Bitė” - a bee, but similar word in English means “to bite”, which (if you have ever been bitten by a bee) realy makes sense. How do you know if there is an actual connection or just a coincidence?

stavros• 8 years ago

Bees sting, they don't bite.

Mediterraneo102• 8 years ago

How do you know if there is an actual connection or just a coincidence?

You look at an etymological dictionary for either language.

anovikov• 8 years ago

In Russian, bee colony is also called 'family' btw, unlike any other animal.

Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees

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