Just another animal to add to your list of animals...
It has a golden U on its dark brown chest--and it climbs almost like a simian.
Dear WW: but that doesn't tell us much about the critter.
It did remind me of how big brown mama bears wean their cubs. They drive them up a tall tree, and cubs, not having done much climbing before, are afraid to come down until Mama is long gone.
OK, so it really is ursus solaris, or Latin to that effect.
http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Sands/9859/sunbear.html
Note that Helarctus malayanus (hope I remembered it right)
comes fro "hel-" = sun, plus arctus = north = Great Bear
constellation being anciently used as north indicator.
Just the other day, on first page of Caesar's Gallic Wars,
he designated north by "septentriones" the seven stars
that make up the Great Bear constellation, Ursa Major.
But your own site, wwh, referred to them as Ursus malayanus. One site called them Malayan sun bears, but others refer to them as Malaysian sun bears. Interesting.
Also found in Sumatra. In Indonesian/Malay called
beruang madu honey bear.
The Kerinci National Park's English language page on the sun bear:
http://www.kerinci.org/ff06.html For some reason I couldn't get the picture to come up, but if you click for the Indonesian version you can see the picture there.
Why are bears rich? Because they have money.
Indonesian for bear is beruang, which could be analysed as ber-uang having money. So much for puns and other such wordplay only being possible in English.
Bingley
RE:In Indonesian/Malay called beruang madu honey bear.
so madu is honey?
many 'honey/sweet(ness) words, in many languages are M(vowel) (soft constinent) (vowel)--
mel, mej, med, mad,
even english as the old word mead (honey wine).
the sweetness shows up in Melody, Melitits (diabities), and hundreds of other words.
(and it occurs to me, while i know english uses HONEY- i have no idea why we don't have a Mel/med/mad/ for sweetness. and instead have honey?)
I wouldn't be surprised if the madu in beruang madu isn't a loanword from Sanskrit. (I know there are supposed to be lots of Indic loanwords, e.g., the name of the language Bahasa Indonesia is from Sanskrit bhasa 'language'.) The two roots *melit and *medhu- in PIE both mean 'honey'. English honey is related to Latin canicæ 'bran' from *ken@ko- 'honey yellow, golden yellow'.
Dear of troy: here is a site that aggrees with much of your
post.
http://www.meadmadecomplicated.org/history/etymology.html
English honey is related to Latin canicæ 'bran' from *ken@ko
Can you expound on how that works, jheem?
I assumed it was from the golden color of the bran in Latin and the honey in Germanic. But phonologically, a 'c' in Latin usually maps to and 'h' in Germanic; cf. canis 'dog' ~ hound, collis 'hill' ~ hill, centum '100' ~ hundred. That takes care the of first 'c', but the last one maps to a 'g' in German Honig, which atrophied into a -y in English. Hoep that helps.
Sanskrit: 'madhu' - honey
Hoep that helps: It sure does jheem Thanks! And WW, they *are cute! Must go see!
Why don't they bees bother him? Don't all bears like honey?
>Don't all bears like honey?
A local honey producer where I live, the largest apiary south of the Equator, sponsors the Malaysian Sun Bears at the Wellington Zoo, and has a TV ad that featured both of them with their snouts deep in large pots of the company's product. In fact, since this ad was the only time I had seen Malaysian Sun Bears, I didn't even know about the marking on their chests. When the Wellington pair had a cub, he was called Arataki, after the sponsor company. Sadly, the child must have been an irreformable bad egg, because he received a sentence of breathtaking inhumanity. He was sent to Australia.
Northern bears have such thick fur the bees can only attack nose and ears. The sunbear is short furred, but the taste of honey pays for the pain. I used to help a bee-keeper taking honey from his hives. He didn't even wear a veil. I have seen him get hundreds of stings on his bald spot, and
just occasionaly murmur:"Oh, cut it out, cut it out."
I didn't enjoy the twenty or so stings I got from bees that
found unprotected areas, but it didn't bother me very much
either. Of course he would have gotten many more stings if
he had not used smoke to mitigate their wrath. I'm not sure
how the smoke works. It may partially block the tiny tubes
through which they get oxygen. That's one of the big effects
of insect sprays.
When the Wellington pair had a cub, he was called Arataki, after the sponsor company. Sadly, the child must have been an irreformable bad egg, because he received a sentence of breathtaking inhumanity. He was sent to Australia.
I handled a sun bear cub at a zoo many moons ago, and I can't remember which zoo it was. Very cute and cuddly except when they want to be put down. Very, very sharp claws and their bite - even as cubs - is not to be sneezed at. This one was being bottle fed because of mum's inability or unwillingness to suckle. I remember the keeper saying that she'd be scarred for life by the time it was weaned. [shock]
which is why both my children were weaned as they got teeth!
teeth idicate a child is getting old enought to start biting and chewing food-- so soft food and not breast milk became an import sourse of nutrients!
