I knew they were big bears but not TWICE A HUMAN size! I didn't even google this image for the polar bear I wanted to see how big a black bear is.
guess I'm never going to Antarctica!
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Arctus = “Bear”, Anti = “against” in ancient Greek, or “opposite” in modern meaning.
Arctic = bears are here
Anti-arctic = opposite bears, or “no bears”.
Has absolutely nothing to do with actual bears though.
The name comes from the constellation Ursa Major, which in Greek was Arktos Megale. Both mean the Great Bear.
Basically it just means north and not north because the Ursa Major constellation has the North Star in it.
It does just kinda work out that bears are in the northern hemisphere and not the southern hemisphere. There’s only one bear native to the southern hemisphere, the Spectacled Bear native to the Andes mountain in South America. There are no bears native to Africa or Oceania at all.
Ursa minor is the one with Polaris in its handle though.
You right. Ursa Major has a chain of stars that point toward Polaris.
Koala bear,
Check mate athiests
/s
yeah if you put bears on antarctica they mutually annihilate
This has come up before on lemmy.
Wouldn’t a better translation given the context be something like the place opposite to the place where there are bears? It’s not like the Greeks somehow intuited that there was such a place and that there would be no bears there.
It's the place opposite /ursa major/ (the great bear constellation, in the northern sky.) The name has nothing to do with actual bears (that's just good luck.)
It's more of a translation-based mnemonic device, really
You fell for the bait.
But I learned so it's fine
I saw this before somewhere and a commenter said they didn't actually know if there were bears or not in these places when they named them. This had more to do with the constellation Ursa (bear) major/minor (north star). But works out to being a nice mnemonic.
In German Baerbel is a woman's name. And you say Baer if you mean beaver. The more you know. 🤷♀️
Beaver is also a slang term for female genitalia in English
Like Baer in german. To be exact the bush.
So did the Greeks traverse the whole planet? Like the idea isn't too far fetched but it's just weird to think about Mediterraneans traveling to the arctics
Lol.