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.
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. :)
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)."
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-does-dagnabbit-me...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
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.
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.
So the word is still there, it's not completely taboo like the original word for bear.
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 thought it would be more wide-spread, but there's wikipedia pages for it in Swedish, Norwegian and Iceland at least:
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. :)
Bear: Ari Wolf: Ujk
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.