Ancient name for "bear" Over 4000 years ago, the ancestors of most modern European and many other languages formed one group of dialects. Their word for "bear" was something like artko (a linguistic rendition: h2ŕ̥tḱos). It developed into, e.g., the Latin ursus, Spanish oso, Welsh arth, Greek άρκτος. Bears in Slovakia Slovakia's bears are biologically closer to the grizzly than to the American black bear. A particularly detailed survey established their number at 1,240 in 2015. Bears are protected in Slovakia, many scavenge in rarely bear-proofed garbage cans, so females can rear three to four cubs instead of the traditional one or two, and some experts suggest that as a result, the country has more than twice as many bears as their habitat should naturally support.

Borrowed words for "bear" Contrary to what casual discussions sometimes maintain, artko, the ancient word for "bear," was also retained in some Celtic languages (arth in Welsh, arzh in Old Breton), or replaced with a borrowing from Germanic (bearach in Irish, bearch in Scottish Gaelic). The other names occasionally quoted for Welsh and Irish are limited merely to recent hunting jargon that uses descriptive terms for other animals too. The jargon did not push out the ancient word from Welsh and Irish (the way tabooing did in Slavic, Germanic, and Baltic). After the Ugric tribes (the ancestors of today's Hungarians, whose speech was unrelated to most European languages) arrived in Central Europe from Asian and East European prairies around 900 CE, they borrowed the word medveď and also maco. The standard Hungarian word for "bear" has since changed to medve. Audio on bears in Slovakia (4' 33"):

By Laura Postma (Slovak-Swiss-Dutch) in English for Deutsche Welle