Domesticating the Horse

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>To PIEians wild and tame seemed to be one and the same.

-- PIE has another word for horse -- *markos -- which has a derived feminine
in Germanic, *markiha.

In animal names a derived feminine in *-eha seems to denote a domestic animal
(eg., PIE *h(1)ekueha, 'mare') and in *-iha denotes a wild animal.  (eg.,
*ulkwiha, 'she-wolf).  Therefore the original meaning of *markhos was
probably specifically a wild horse.

There's also an eastern-IE word, *gheios (from "impells, drives") which gives
reflexes in Armenian -- 'ji', 'horse' -- and Sanskrit 'haya', 'horse'.

Although in point of fact, English has no separate word for "wild horse", and
we distinguish the wild from the domestic variety without any particular
problem.

>It is not hard to see how Sredni Stog culture might have learned
>domestication and livestock breeding from Tripolye and applied it to the
>animal it had a wealth of - the horse.

-- no objection there; that's probably exactly what happened.  PIE-speaking
Sredni Stog picked up Neolithic traits from the non-PIE-speaking Tripolye
culture and then did them the dirty.