Domesticating the Horse

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

I wrote:
The linguistics seems quite against you here, I think.  No word for 'the wild
horse' in early IE or *PIE as far as I can tell.  To PIEians wild and tame
seemed to be one and the same.  Colin P. Groves suggests that there's very
good evidence that the possibly ancestral wild 'tarpan' of eastern Europe and
possibly even an ancestral wild Equus ferus were still frequently encountered
in Roman times, but those wild horses apparently were given no distinctive
name - except to be called 'wild' horses.  (OED says 'tarpan' is a Khirgiz
Tartar name.)

In a message dated 2/25/2000 1:25:12 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>-- 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.

Your saying *-iha denoted a wild animal, but it only shows up in the female
ending.  (eg., *ulkwiha, 'she-wolf).  And that the -(i)ha ending for
<mer(i)ha> in Germanic meant the same thing.  In Germanic, could <mer(i)ha>
have ended in -eha?  And are there any other examples of this?  This should
apply to other domestics and wild species, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't.
(Cf., *k^(h)e:i-eha (stative, intrans, "be fast") <*k^(h)e:- (deer, run
fast), Porkorny I 538 (1954))

An OHG word for a domesticated horse is <marah>, female domesticated horse,
<mer(i)ha>.  Only Germanic uses the word for the female horse and that use is
obviously derivative.  The <marko-> word appears throughout Germanic for all
horses and for female horses, but in Celtic it is ONLY used for the horse in
general. A number of Greek historians tell us the Celtic word for horse was
<marka>, never mentioning <equus> or <hippos> or any other name. Early 6th
Century BC uses of <marka-> have been found on inscriptions to the Thracian
and Illyrian "horseman" god. (Cf.Marcomanni.)  Colin P. Groves mentions a
whole series of references to WILD HORSES going back to Roman times and NOT
ONE appears to use the <marko-> word.

JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:
>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.

No. I've seen not one shred of serious evidence of ANY IE language EVER
actually using a separate native word for "wild horses."

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

This was discussed extensively on this list this month and a good account of
the word's separate usage was given by rao.3 at osu.edu and of its relative
dating by mcv.

JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:
>Therefore the original meaning of *markhos was probably specifically a wild
>horse.

This is the usual careless, bilbous overstatement that we've come to expect.

There appears to be no serious linguistic evidence that PIEians distinguished
between wild and domesticated horses, so that using the horse word to date
PIE dispersal with any kind of overblown, absolute statements would appear to
be a serious misrepresentation of the truth - intended or not.  Horses were
there before there was a PIE.  Nothing identifies the *ekwos word with either
originating with a rider or domestication.  The only root it has been
connected with so far is (*ok^us "fast").

I wrote:
>>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.

JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:
>-- 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.

Please recall that then you have just dated PIE at about 4500BC.

If the Uralic borrowings of PIE words are indeed from before 5000BC, then you
have good evidence that IE-speaking Tripolye gave IE-speaking Sredni Stog a
language, domestication and maybe even a population.  You see there is no
discernible evidence of Sredni Stog before 5000BC.  But there may now be
evidence of PIE in the same area - before 5000BC.

Regards,
Steve Long