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Is it BARE in mind or BEAR in mind? (1 Viewer)

Chazz_S

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I've always thought it was 'bare'. It just seemed to make more sense to me, although I didn't know for sure. I read a post on another forum where someone corrected a person who used bare. Which is it??!
 

Ricardo C

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I've always thought it was 'bare'. It just seemed to make more sense to me, although I didn't know for sure. I read a post on another forum where someone corrected a person who used bare. Which is it??!
It didn't ever occur to you how "bare in mind" makes no sense whatsoever?
 

Keith Mickunas

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It didn't ever occur to you how "bare in mind" makes no sense whatsoever?
I had to think about it a moment. I see "bear" and think only of the animal and not its other meanings. Which is strange, why does the name of an animal have so many meanings?
 

Joseph DeMartino

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Which is strange, why does the name of an animal have so many meanings?
The name of the animal doesn't have many meanings. The spelling/pronunciation combination "bear" is used to denote many unrelated meanings. It is more-or-less happenstance that they came to share the same sound and spelling. English has an unsual number of such homonyms because it borrows volcabularly from so many sources. (In part because England was such a popular destination for invaders and conquerers for much of the Middle Ages. Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Norman French - who were originaly Vikings, that is "Norsemen", from Scandanavia - actual Vikings direct from Scandanavia, you name it.)

Words that end up being spelled and spoken alike come into our language by completely different routes and have nothing in common in sense or origin except the accident of how they sound and how that sound became standardized in spelling when moveable type was introduced. (Prior to which spelling was gloriously idiosyncratic and much more apt to reflect the actual sound of a word - as least as spoken by that particular writer.)

The verb "bear" used in "bear (that is, "carry") in mind" finds its way into modern English from Middle and Old English (beren, beran) via words meaning "to carry" that go back through old High German (beran), Norse (bera), the Latin ferre, the Greek pherein , all of which are ultimately related to the Sanskrit bharati, "he carries"

The noun "bear" is a more purely English word, and derives from the word for the color "brown" in various Germanic languages. The word, not unnaturally, became attached to the big brown animal that folks encountered in the forest. (Brown bears probably being the only type that would be seen in northern Europe.)

Regards,

Joe
 

Hunter P

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Thank you, Dr. Joseph, but that is totally wrong. Our ancient ancestors used to push, pull, kick, or throw objects to move them from once place to another. Dragging one's food home was very common practice in the old days. Unfortunately, this caused one's food to become very dirty and unsanitary afterwards. This was soon revolutionized by an observant man coming home after dragging his food home from a hunting and gathering excursion.
He saw a bear in the river catching fish. The bear caught a fish and wanted to bring it to shore to eat. Instead of tossing it like any smart man would do, it put it in its teeth and carried the fish to shore! Eureka!
And thus was invented yet another way of moving objects from one way to another: bearing it.:D
 

Erik.Ha

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Dec 24, 2003
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I heard the conection between the english word "bear" (the animal) and the verb (to carry) had something to do with the constelations Ursa Major and Minor (the big and little "Bears") or as they have been refered to popularly (and which they much more closely resemble than any animal), the "Big and little dippers" (aka water "Bearers")

Of course, that could just be bullshit...
 

Rex Bachmann

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Eric.Ha. wrote (post #16):


Quote:



. . . .Of course, that could just be bullshit...






Bingo!


Joseph De Martino wrote (post #12):


Quote:



Words that end up being spelled and spoken alike come into our language by completely different routes and have nothing in common in sense or origin except the accident of how they sound and how that sound became standardized in spelling when moveable type was introduced. (Prior to which spelling was gloriously idiosyncratic and much more apt to reflect the actual sound of a word - as least as spoken by that particular writer.)






Two words: homonomy and homophony ('sounds alike and is spelled alike' and 'only sounds alike', respectively).



Quote:



The noun "bear" is a more purely English word, and derives from the word for the color "brown" in various Germanic languages. The word, not unnaturally, became attached to the big brown animal that folks encountered in the forest. (Brown bears probably being the only type that would be seen in northern Europe.)





Actually, both the verb bear and the noun bear are native words inherited from proto-Germanic, the common ancestral language of English, Dutch (Anglo-Frisian dialects), High German (German standard dialect), and the Scandinavian languages, which itself goes back farther still to Proto-Indo-European. It's not so clear that the noun for the animal is from the root for 'brown' (which, by the way, is supposed to also underlie the word for 'beaver'), although that's the standard etymology (word history derivation). It's also possible that it comes from the root that means 'wild animal' *gh'wer- found in Latin ferus 'wild; wild beast' (whence English ferocious), Greek the:r 'wild beast' (as opposed to domesticated animals), as well as the Sanskrit verb hvar- 'to walk in a bent fashion (i.e., on all fours)'.

By the way, the [r] in bare 'naked', goes back to an [s]-sound, so it has nothing historically in common with either the verb or the name of the animal. There are doubtless still dialects where all these words are not homophonous.
 

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