• Uruanna@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    For bears, that works (especially since we know about other words like arctus etc.), but itā€™s odd that this was also done for other words like horse, linked to PIE ā€œto runā€. So yes for the euphemism theory and we consider that calling a cat species " Mau" because of their sound as a euphemism, or horses as a whole ā€œrunā€ because theyā€™re hella fast, but I donā€™t know if we need to push that further with the taboo theory.