The True Name of the Bear
The True Name of the Bear
[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 McCulloch, drawn with short, curly hair, 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: ROAR Gretchen: Oh Gretchen: Oh no
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.

The Canadian Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch tweeted about 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In the comic, McCulloch applies sound shifting laws to it to guess how it would have evolved in English had it not been superseded, but saying it seems to actually summon a bear.
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. Another Indo-European language where the word for bear is very close to this extrapolation is Armenian, where it's written արջ and pronounced “artch”. The comic does not explain why speakers of Welsh, Cornish, Italic, Greek, Indo-Aryan, and Armenian languages do not summon a bear every time they refer to one. [ citation needed ]
Use of true names appears to be highly effective in the xkcd universe, rather like a fairy tale , and it is also a common trope elsewhere. Some say a true name contains clear meaning of who someone or something really is.
In 2421: Tower of Babel a linguist that resembles Gretchen from this comic appears. Since that story takes place in biblical time, it is not Gretchen, but obviously this is how linguists look in xkcd from now on.
[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 McCulloch, drawn with short, curly hair, 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: ROAR Gretchen: Oh Gretchen: Oh no
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.
