What's the relationship of Ursa Minor/Little Dipper to dogs? [closed]

Solution 1:

The history of the connection between Ursa Minor (the Latin label) and 'cynosure' (dog tail) is uncertain.

It looks like Wordsmith is following the same source as the Wikipedia article on Ursa Minor. The Wordsmith entry is very short and has left out some of the connections:

The ancient name of the constellation is Cynosura (Greek Κυνοσούρα "dog's tail"). The origin of this name is unclear (Ursa Minor being a "dog's tail" would imply that another constellation nearby is "the dog", but no such constellation is known).

As there is no linguistic connection, no cognates trail between arcto-/ursus and cyno-/canis, it is most likely that there is just different culture involved (or to be more precise, that one guy said it looked like a dog's tail, the other guy a little bear (or more likely named as the small version of the big constellation named a bear)).

If you just remove the reference to Ursa Minor in the Wordsmith article, there would be no problem here linguistically.