Horses

[Steve Gustafson]

Rick McCallister writes:

> The word presumibly could have applied to other equids.
> I don't know if wild asses were present in Anatolia at that time
> but they were present in nearby Mesopotamia and Iran.
> The weakness, of course, is that words derived from *ekwos almost
> invariably apply to the horse.

It is not unknown for inherited words to fasten themselves to different
species.  Gk. "phegos" refers to a kind of oak, unlike Latin "fagus" and
English "beech."  On this side of the Atlantic, the "robin" and "buzzard"
are different birds from the ones the words originally pointed to.

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