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This is the regular script form of the Chinese character for horse:  馬.

When I used to give talks in schools, libraries, and retirement homes, anywhere I was invited, I would write 馬 (10 strokes, official in Taiwan) on the blackboard or a large sheet of paper and show it to the audience, then ask them what they thought it meant.  Out of the hundreds, if not thousands, of people to whom I showed this character, not one person ever guessed what it signified.  When I told those who were assembled that it was a picture of something they were familiar with, nobody got it.  When I said it was a picture of a common animal, nobody could recognize what it represented.  

All the more, when I showed the audiences the simplified form of the character, 马 (3 strokes, official in the PRC), nobody could get it.

Here is the evolution of this character from the oldest form (about 3,200 years ago) at the top left, going to the top right, then going to the next line and proceeding from left to right, and the same for the third line, and ending with the regular, traditional form and regular, simplified form at the bottom right.

Not one single stroke in any of these forms gives the slightest indication of how to pronounce the character, nor does the character as a whole tell you how it should be pronounced.  You simply have to memorize, by brute force, that traditional and simplified forms, 馬 and 马, are pronounced mǎ and mean "horse".

 

Doesn't look much like a horse, does it?  One of the main reasons it's unrecognizable is because the horse is standing vertically.  And why is it standing vertically?  That's because it was easier for the scribe to engrave the characters of the divination with a sharp instrument holding in that orientation the ox scapula or turtle plastron, both of which are of hard bone and of greater height than width.

 

Now that you realize if you rotate the Bronze Age form of the horse 90º to the left so that it is standing on all four legs (though you can only see two of them), that it has an enormous, elongated head on the left side (after leftward rotation), with mouth and pointed ear, plus a conspicuously huge eye.  I have maintained that the eye was exaggerated this way because, for Central Plains people who were not intimately acquainted with horses, they were terrified of the large jaws and especially the big, glaring eyes of the horse, though a few people have told me that they don't think those features reflected a fear of horses nor were they especially noticeable.  I emphatically beg to differ.  

 

Now we must ask, where did the word (its sound and meaning) for horse come from?

 

The domesticated horse, the chariot, and the wheel came to East Asia from the west, and so did horse riding:

Juha Janhunen assembled a wealth of relevant data in “The horse in East Asia: Reviewing the Linguistic Evidence,” in Victor H. Mair ed.,The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man; Philadelphia:  The University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998), vol. 1 of 2, pp. 415-430, but didn't draw a firm conclusion concerning possible relatedness between IE words for horse and Central and East Asian words for horse.

Here are Janhunen's latest thoughts (3/3/19, personal communication) on Eurasian words for horse:

I do not see any particular chronological problem in connecting Old Chinese *mra with IE "mare".  A possible problem is, however, the geographical distance, as cognates of *mare* do not seem to have been attested in other IE branches except Germanic and Celtic.

However this may be, my point in the 1998 paper was that horse terminology is more diversified in the languages spoken in the region where the horse comes from, and where the wild horse still lives, that is, northern Kazakhstan, East Turkestan, and Mongolia. In view of this it looks like the word *mVrV 'horse' could be originally Mongolic. In any case, it was certainly borrowed from Mongolic to Tungusic (at least twice), and quite probably also to Koreanic (*morV) and Sinitic (*mVrV), from where it spread further to Japonic. From Tungusic it was borrowed to Amuric (Ghilyak). It may also have been borrowed westwards to some branches of IE, if we do not think that the geographical distance is a problem. However, even if the cognates of "mare" can mean 'horse' in general, this does not seem to have been the basic word for 'horse' in PIE. By contrast, in Mongolic *morï/n is the basic word for 'horse', while other items are used for 'stallion' (*adïrga, also in Turkic) and 'mare' (*gexü, not attested in Turkic, but borrowed to Tungusic).

I have always felt that Sinitic mǎ 馬 ("horse") is related to Germanic "mare", though not necessarily directly (from Germanic to Sinitic).

There are some problems, of course, namely:

1. "mare" refers to the female of the species.
2. Germanic is too late for Sinitic, which had the word mǎ 馬 ("horse") by 1200 BC (though Janhunen doesn't think it's an insuperable problem)

However, the word is also in Celtic (see below), and how far back would that take us?

Even the 5th ed. of the AH Dictionary cites Pokorny 700 "marko", but that may not be a reliable PIE root.  Nonetheless, the phonology of the Celtic words alone fits quite well with the Old Sinitic reconstructions for mǎ 馬 ("horse"), namely:

(Baxter–Sagart): /*mˤraʔ/ (Zhengzhang): /*mraːʔ/

Here is what the Online Etymology Dictionary has to say about "mare":

…"female of the horse or any other equine animal," Old English meare, also mere (Mercian), myre (West Saxon), fem. of mearh "horse," from Proto-Germanic *marhijo- "female horse" (source also of Old Saxon meriha, Old Norse merr, Old Frisian merrie, Dutch merrie, Old High German meriha, German Mähre "mare"), said to be of Gaulish origin (compare Irish and Gaelic marc, Welsh march [VHM:  ["stallion; steed"], Breton marh "horse").

The fem. form is not recorded in Gothic, and there are no known cognates beyond Germanic and Celtic, so perhaps it is a word from a substrate language. The masc. forms have disappeared in English and German except as disguised in marshal (n.).

So the big questions are:

1. how far back do the Celtic words go?
2. how are the Germanic and Celtic words related?
3. what came before the Celtic and Germanic words?  "a word from a substrate language"  OR Is Pokorny 700 "marko" for real?  (He could not have dreamed it up to satisfy a possible relationship with Sinitic.)

From Axel Schuessler, ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese (Honolulu:  University of Hawai'i Press, 2007), p. 373:

mǎ 馬 ("horse"), Minimal Old Chinese / Sinitic reconstruction *mrâ?

Horse and chariot were introduced into Shang period China around 1200 BC from the west (Shaughnessy HJAS 48, 1988: 189-237). Therefore this word is prob. a loan from a Central Asian language, note Mongolian morin 'horse'. Either the animal has been known to the ST people long before its domesticated version was introduced; or OC and TB languages borrowed the word from the same Central Asian source.

Middle Korean mol also goes back to the Central Asian word, as does Japanese uma, unless it is a  loan from CH (Miyake 1997: 195). Tai maaC2 and similar SE Asian forms are CH loans.

So much for horse-related words for now.  There are many more posts and comments related to horses, horse chariots, horse riding, and so forth, and more to come.

Next up, we have to figure out the sexagenary cycle of 60 intermeshed 10 Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches (zodiacal animals) and how 5 duodenary cycles fit into that, horse being the 7th animal in that cycle of 12 zodiacal signs.

Meanwhile, today let's celebrate the Year of the Horse in as many languages as we can think of:

The Horse zodiac sign (seventh in the cycle) represents energy and independence, known as mǎ (马) in Chinese, uma (午) in Japanese, and ngọ in Vietnamese. It is widely recognized in East Asian, Southeast Asian, and related zodiac systems that share the 12-animal cycle, including Thai, Korean, and Mongolian cultures.  (AIO)

Hi Yo / Ho Silver, Away!

Selected readings

• "Mare, mǎ ("horse"), etc." (11/17/19)
• "Horse culture comes east" (11/15/20) — with very long bibliography
• "Once more on Sinitic *mraɣ and Celtic and Germanic *marko for 'horse'" (4/28/20)
• "Some Mongolian words for 'horse'" (11/7/19)
• "'Horse Master' in IE and in Sinitic" (11/9/19)
• "Horses, soma, riddles, magi, and animal style art in southern China" (11/11/19)
• "'Horse' and 'language' in Korean" (10/30/19)
• “Of horseriding and Old Sinitic reconstructions” (4/21/19)
• Mair, Victor H.  “The Horse in Late Prehistoric China:  Wresting Culture and Control from the ‘Barbarians.’”  In Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew, and Katie Boyle, ed.  Prehistoric steppe adaptation and the horse,  McDonald Institute Monographs.  Cambridge:  McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2003, pp. 163-187 — The domesticated horse, the chariot, and the wheel came to East Asia from the west, and so did horse riding.

February 16, 2026 @ 11:09 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and astronomy, Language and biology, Writing systems

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