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Comment by aasasd | Hacker News Reader

Afaik a name was/is believed to have the power to summon a supernatural being that it identifies. God and the devil both have a dozen or more euphemisms. (I've also heard about a rather non-Christiany belief of ‘true names’ having command over some beings, but not sure that it's not a modern fantasy invention.)

Dunno about material beings, but hiccups are believed in some places to be caused by someone remembering you.

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It was absolutely a thing, and the best example is that the old Indo-European word for bear is eradicated in Northern European languages, because it was thought that the true name of the animal would summon it, and bears were not something you wanted around.

So instead of using the taboo name, everyone used the noa name for the animal, a euphemism, which is why "bear" actually means "the brown one". In Slavic languages, a common euphemism the "the honey eater" - "medved".

The original word exists in Southern European languages, "ours" in French, "orso" in Italian, coming from "ursus" in Latin, and "arctos" in Greek.

Another example is the word for wolf, which exists in that form in most European languages (wolf, ulv, vlk, lobo), but in Swedish the common word is "varg", which is a noa-name, a euphemism, meaning cattle-killer. "ulv" still exists in Swedish, but is seen as an archaic fairy-tale word

There is also the French saying: "quand on parle du loup, il sort du bois" [1]. Literally "when you speak of the wolf he comes out of the woods", known in English as "speak of the devil".

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[1] Also: "... on en voit la queue" or "le nez", i.e. "you see his tail" or "his nose".

Same in Hungarian (a Uralic language). Wolf is "farkas", lit. the tailed one, and deer is "szarvas", lit. the horned one. Both used to have true names but became taboo and got lost.

Interestingly Estonian might be nowadays an exception to the trend you mentioned and used the other names earlier. People call wolves and bears respectively "hunt" and "karu" instead of "susi" (the same as to what the Finns use primarily I think) and "mesikäpp" ("honey paw" which has strong connotations to "likes to eat honey") nowadays.

> ‘true names’ having command over some beings, but not sure that it's not a modern fantasy invention.

Which made it a great title for one of my all-time favorite SF novellas by Vernor Vinge. The connection was that if you were doing stuff you weren't supposed to be doing and the authorities found out who you were in the real world, you were toast.

Really good story even if it's pretty old at this point.

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