"Horse" in Native American Languages

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In connection with the posts below, I have a question for the list.  Any help
would be greatly appreciated:

Q: What word/words were used to refer to "horses" among the various Native
American languages/dialects after those animals were introduced by Europeans?
 Were the names unique to the various languages or did the same words cross
language borders?  Were they adaptions of European words or "home grown?"
Again, any help will be greatly appreciated.

In a message dated 10/15/99 7:43:37 AM, sarima at ix.netcom.com wrote:

<<Except that Renfrew can only reach this "conclusion" by ignoring many facts
about PIE that are quite secure (e.g. the universality of *ekwos, and the
original distinction between wlkwos and kuoon) and which are inconsistent
with what is known about early Neolithic culture (no domesticated equids and
no domesticated dog).>>

I do not know about "quite secure."  In fact, Renfrew did address this
general issue in terms of both convergence and technical innovations.  (We
would not date a proto-language of English and Russian for example based on
the fact that "harddrive" sometimes appears identically in both languages.)

Another important point is that "semantics" come creeping into the *ekwos
analysis.  "No DOMESTICTED equids" - for example - seems to disregard the
fact that horse bones are common in the debris of pre-neolithic sites in
Greece.  It seems they were the number one source of meat.  Was there a
different word for earlier wild horses versus later domesticates?  Are we
also possibly being presumptive that *ekwos was literally a horse rather than
something like a particular kind of horse - true horses being only one kind
of horse-like animal that appears in the archaeological evidence.

I am not too sure about what the story is with <<the original distinction
between wlkwos and kuoon>> but much the same questions might arise if
"hounds," "curs" and "dogs" actually always represented dogs of different
purposes rather than dogs in general.  Simple equivalencies over the course
of thousands of years I suspect always carry a high measure of uncertainty.

Regards,
Steve Long