Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees | Hacker News Reader

Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees

bbc.com

129 pointsMiriamWeiner40 comments

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

True names can be dangerous things, impossible to unspeak.

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.

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.

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)

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. :)

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

better be extra-super careful! :)

Is it? I thought it is not known. Some people believe it's "behr" because of "behrlohga" - "bear den" but there is more plausible etymology for that being derived from actual Old Slavic "trash"/"dirt" than "behr + lohg".

But then it is derived from "brown" (dirt, garbage) in the same way as in English.

I doubt it has a close connection to "brown". "Behr-" in Slavic languages, when stands for any color at all, is, usually, for "white".

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...

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)."

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

Nope, that is a folk etymology, see https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic...

Hm, interesting, always thought it was from parts 'med' and 'ved'. Though Ukrainian's 'vedmed' kinda contradicts suggestion that first part it 'medv'. Maybe it started some long time ago with 'honey eater' and then transitioned...

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.

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.

'Noa' is a Polynesian term apparently; basically it's the opposite of 'taboo' (also Polynesian.)

It's not on the face of it a very confidence-inspiring source, but r/askhistorians is as good as Reddit gets, and the poster here wrote an actual book on the subject. Give it a read: https://thingsonreddit.com/things/13812/comments/

I love /r/askhistorians, they have fantastic contributions and moderation. Thanks very much for this.

Yeah, I tried a quick googling for it as well, and got buried in resources about the name Noah instead.

I thought it would be more wide-spread, but there's wikipedia pages for it in Swedish, Norwegian and Iceland at least:

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noaord

Fortunately Google translate does a good job with that, thanks very much. I really love learning about new quirks of language.

I’ve read it now, and that’s so cool. It also cam with some good references I’m going to get into now. Thanks again. :)

"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.

Yes, most Swedes will understand "ulv" as well, but it's associated with stories for children from long ago, if that makes sense. It exists in expressions and derived words, so "werewolf" is "varulv", and "a wolf in sheep's clothing" is "en ulv i fårakläder", for example.

So the word is still there, it's not completely taboo like the original word for bear.

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

Bear: Ari Wolf: Ujk

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...

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

Baltic and Slavic languages are related.

I like how listopad/lystopad/listapad and gruden/grudien/grudzien/hruden' are mixed up october/november/december - all depending on the tribe.

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

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

“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?

Bees sting, they don't bite.

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

You look at an etymological dictionary for either language.

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

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