Five Antiquities of Hay (was Thy Thigh, etc.)

[philjennings at juno.com]

As an appendix to my prior post, it occurs to me that the invention/naming of
hay might be associated with the domestication of the horse.

Human use of the horse has historically been abusive, with hard riders keeping
strings of horses and wearing them out one by one.  Basically we ride horses
and keep them otherwise occupied, precisely at those times of day when they
need to be grazing.  To compensate, horse-people take steps to provide food,
even concentrated food, at other times of day, ie. when horses are stabled or
corralled.

If horse people were also cow people, they might have gradually adopted the
same policy in the care of one animal as for the other, but horses needed to
take precedence.  Horses forced the issue.  Cows didn't.

This would explain the lateness of our proto-Germanic and Balto-Slavic "hay"
words.  Certainly their LBK predecessors had cow stockades, but perhaps were
lazy about providing fodder to their cattle during shut-in times, because after
all the animals had plenty of time to graze during the day.

Of course, here I'm ignoring the phenomenon of "working" cattle, as we do
easily nowadays in the age of tractors.  If the LBK people used draught oxen,
et cetera, they may have conceived the need to compensate them for their labor.
The use or non-use of hay by the LBK people seems to be the central issue.  If
the LBK language represents IE at an early and fairly unified stage, and they
used hay, there would be a common term across many language sub-families.  If
the Corded Ware people used hay (probable), then if there is no common term
across several sub-languages, one possible conclusion is that the Corded Ware
people were linguistically a mere superstrate, absorbed by diverging IE groups,
or absorbed in the west and only dominant in part of the east.