Of horseriding and Old Sinitic reconstructions<\/a>.\u201d I too have always been sympathetic to the possibility of a mare-\u99ac connection, which I\u2019ve tended to assume would have happened through a Chinese borrowing from Indo-European either directly or mediatedly, though as you point out the problem of the \u201cmare\u201d root\u2019s presence in only Germanic and Celtic is, well, a problem.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
But another point you mention \u2014 \u201c1. \u2018mare\u2019 refers to the female of the species\u201d \u2014 is not actually a problem. This is because the reflexes of the Indo-European words for ALL THREE of the non-horse large domesticated animals in the Indo-European bestiary are used in Germanic (well, at least the descendant languages) only for the female of the species. Thus from IE *owi- (originally *h2owi-), \u201csheep,\u201d we get only \u201cewe,\u201d and have supplied the general species name from the Germanic-only \u201csheep.\u201d From IE *gwo-, \u201cbovine animal\u201d (we don\u2019t even HAVE a singular noun for the whole species regardless of gender), we get only \u201ccow,\u201d and have taken our word for the male from an entirely different root and our word for the species collectively from the Latin for \u201cmovable property.\u201d From IE *su-, \u201cpig, swine,\u201d we get only \u201csow,\u201d and have taken the name for the whole species from god knows where. So assuming something like *marko really was an IE root for \u201chorse\u201d (alongside *ekwo which Germanic largely lost), it would be consistent with larger intra-Germanic patterns for it to be applied only to the female. I note that our word for the whole species, \u201chorse,\u201d is another Germanic-only innovation or substrate borrowing like \u201csheep\u201d and \u201cpig.\u201d There\u2019s a pattern here, and \u201cmare\u201d fits right in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[This is a guest post by Robert Hymes] I just happened to be reading your Language Log post from April, \u201cOf horseriding and Old Sinitic reconstructions.\u201d I too have always been sympathetic to the possibility of a mare-\u99ac connection, which I\u2019ve tended to assume would have happened through a Chinese borrowing from Indo-European either directly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194,178,223],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-borrowing","category-etymology","category-language-and-biology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44986"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44986\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45046,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44986\/revisions\/45046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}