Taboo replacements

[Nik Taylor]

Robert Whiting wrote:
> One of the things that makes taboo a likely factor in the
> replacement of some animal names is the repeated shifts.

Question: Could at least a few of these "replacements" merely be
dialectal variations within PIE?  Perhaps when the Indo-Europeans
encountered the horse, the dialect which eventually became Latin adopted
something that became equus, and the proto-Greek dialect adopted the
ancestor of _hippos_ and so on.  For that matter, could some also just
be a substrate influence from the pre-IE peoples?

[ Moderator's note:
  Greek _hippos_ is usually taken to be a development of *ek'wos.  This is one
  of the animal names that extends across the family.
  --rma ]

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