"bow"

[Rankin, Robert L]

> In an (un)connected note, Uto-Aztecan Nahuatl has the borrowing "cahuayo"
for "horse". However, in compounds, the stem for "deer" prevails, e.g.,
< mazacalli > 'it is a/the stable' from  < maza- > 'deer' and
< -cal- > 'house'.

Neat.  And another nice example of the principle that, when looking for conservative forms of a word, prefer the root in the DERIVED and COMPOUNDED forms to the independent word.  Benveniste found this fairly systematically in the Indo-European cognate sets for 'family', 'clan' and 'tribe'.  The independent forms of the reflexes in the different subgroups had all sorts of meanings -- 'village, neighborhood, nation, people, etc.' but in the compound or derived terms for the person who presided over each of the groups the original meanings were well preserved making semantic reconstruction (and reconstruction of the levels of PIE society) relatively easy.
 
Bob