[[rage-madnes-fury-mania-berserkir]] --- ## By Animal [[wolf-men]] [[bear-men]] ## Taboo Names ([[klein-et2017-20]]) Individual words for non-domesticated animals were frequently prone to tabooistic distortion or euphemistic designations. - Both phenomena may be present in the word for ‘wolf’, PIE *u̯l̥kᵘ̯os (: Skt. vr̥kaḥ, Goth. wulfs), which has a variant form *luku̯os (: Gk. lúkos, Lat. lupus, a Sabellic loanword in Latin, cf. also *u̯l̥pē- in Lat. vulpēs ‘fox’ ) and may have been a euphemistic term ‘the dangerous one’ (in order not to utter the animal’s ‘real’ name), cf. Skt. (adj.) a-vr̥ ká- ‘safe’ (‘not dangerous’; prob. Hitt. walkuwa- ‘dangerous’, cf. Lehrman 1987). - Similarly, the word for ‘bear’, which probably was *hr̥tk̑o- [340] in PIE, has been replaced in Germanic by ‘the brown one’ (OHG bēr, ON bjǫrn, OE bera, cf. Lith. bė́ras ‘brown’; an alternative proposal relates the term to the word for ‘wild animal’ *g̑ hu̯ er- [44]), in Slavonic by ‘honey-eater’ (: Russ. medved’) and in Baltic simply by ‘licker’ (: Lith. loky ̃s).