The issue of a PIE-stage domesticated horse

The article examines the lexical items in relationship with horses in the Indo-European
languages. It is shown that these words do not fit the regular phonetic correspondences of
the Indo-European languages. They have limited extension within the family and most of
them can be traced back to Altaic languages. The conclusion is that the Proto-Indo-
European language split much earlier than the domestication of horses.

Introduction

Horses play a particular role in the historiography of IE studies and in the dating of PIE. This
animal has rather obvious phallic features and its relationship with Indo-Europeanists
themselves could be surveyed from a psychoanalytical point of view. But in the article I will
deal as much as possible with basic facts of lexical and phonetic nature. After two centuries of
scientific quest for the PIE homeland, which had been preceded by as about much time since
the “Celto-Scythic” expansion from around the Black Sea proposed by Leibniz and before
him by Boxhorn in 1654, there remain two reasonable options: the Pontico-Caspian theory
and the Anatolian theory:

So if one accepts, for example, that Proto-Indo-European was spoken by the first farmers to
enter Europe (and only by them), then the archaeologist can put a date of c.7000 BC on the
event and, hence, the protolanguage. Alternatively, if one suggests that Proto-Indo-European
was carried into south-eastern Europe with the spread of horse-riding pastoralists from the
steppelands and the earliest evidence for this incursion dates to c. 4500 BC, then we have
another date for Proto-Indo-European. (Mallory & Adams 2006:101)

Quite obviously, horses are not neutral in the issue:

The [Anatolian] solution requires IE expansions from the beginning of the Neolithic and
postulates the existence of a series of IE-speaking cultures across Eurasia in areas which, at
the time postulated, do not reflect temporally critical items of the reconstructed PIE
vocabulary. For example, the same word for horse is attested in almost all IE stocks (from
Ireland to Chinese Turkestan) and yet the animal is not known in Anatolia until the 4th
millennium BC (and pace Dolgopolsky 1993:240, the Luvian and Lycian cognates of the PIE
word for horse are as likely to be inherited as borrowed from an Indo-Iranian language) or
Greece until the Bronze Age (and can only be explained away by presuming longdistant
acquaintance with the horse). (Mallory 1997:109-110)

The horse belongs to the category of “temporally critical” items which are supposed to
bolster the communis opinio that PIE should be dated as late as “the 4th millennium BC”. It is
therefore of paramount importance to have a clear assessment of the value of the items that
relate to horses when it comes to dating the terminus ante quem of disintegrating PIE.

The horse Equus caballus

The majority of horse species evolved in North America. From there, they occasionally spread
to other continents. About three million years ago, hoofed Equus, the ancestor of living
horses, spread to several continents including South America. Archaeological remains and
cave paintings show that wild horses lived in Europe for a long time. They still roamed the
plains of Europe, Asia, North America and North Africa during the late Pleistocene (- 9 600
BC). By the end of the last Ice Age the range of the wild horse was much reduced, probably
due to the climatic and vegetational shift (e.g. forests grew) as well as an increase in the
human population. North American wild horses became extinct around 10.500 BCE and in the
Near and Middle East wild horses disappeared a few thousand year ago.

Distribution of the subspecies of horses Equus Caballus circa -9 500 BC.

Wild horses survived in Sweden until the early Holocene and may have existed in England
at the time of the Roman invasion. Wild horses were known in the Rhineland until at least the
13th century. In historic times only two subspecies survived, both in Eurasia: the tarpan
(Equus ferus ferus) in Eastern Europe and the Mongolian wild horse or Przewalski's horse
(Equus ferus przewalskii) in Mongolia. The tarpan was about 130 cm high at the withers. It
was mouse-grey in colour, with a well-developed black mid-dorsal stripe, partly falling mane,
and a slightly concave facial profile. The word tarpan means ‘wild horse’ in Turkmen.
Horses got domesticated in the area to the north of the Caspian sea, where they had
remained widespread. The earliest dating for the process of domestication can be assessed to
be -4 500 BC.
 The horse and the Proto-Indo-European language

Ever since the beginning of the Indo-European studies, it has been taken as a given that the
speakers of the PIE original community knew the horse as a domesticated animal. Moreover
the belief that PIE speakers are the first domesticators of the horse and the additional belief
that the PIE language owes its spread in Eurasia to this success are widespread as well. These
beliefs are coherent with the theory of the Pontico-Caspian origin of PIE circa - 4 500 BC in
the late Neolithic:

If one grants to the IE lexicon a word for ‘horse’, a reconstruction that is attested in so many
IE stocks that it can hardly be denied (Hamp 1990a) and whose cognate forms are to be
found in both Mycenaean and Classical Greek (Plath 1994), then one must explain the fact
that the earliest evidence for the horse in Greece only dates to the Bronze Age, c. 3500 years
after its occupation by our putative Proto-Greeks. To explain this by a later loanword is not
particularly convincing since it requires us to believe that the Proto-Greek language
remained essentially unchanged from the beginning of the Neolithic to the Bronze Age to
accommodate the borrowing of the word for ‘horse’ in a way undetectable from all of the
otherwise inherited items of the PIE vocabulary. (Mallory 1997:101)

The last sentence is extremely interesting to read several times: the word for ‘horse’ is
undetectable from all of the otherwise inherited items of the PIE vocabulary. The rest of the
article will show that about all the considerations that are supposed to bolster that theory are
wrong and do not conform to the most basic requirements of the comparative method.
A first step is to list the lexemes that are supposed to have existed in the PIE language to
describe the horse. These items are :

- (Pokorny p.301-2) ≈H1eǩwo- ‘horse’,1

- (Pokorny p.700) ≈marko- ‘horse’,

In addition, several related items are :

- (not in Pokorny) ≈kul- ‘colt’,

- (Pokorny p.530) ≈ǩa(:)pho-/*ǩo(:)pHo- ‘hoof’.
- (Pokorny p.842-3) ≈puH2l- ‘foal’,
- (Pokorny p.861) ≈reidh- ‘to ride, to be moving’,

Some of these words will be discussed below. Before I show that these “words” have
considerable phonetic problems and that most of them are loanwords of Altaic origin, a first
general remark can be done. In the case of sheep and goats, which are among the first animals
to have been domesticated, there exists a large set of words that describe male, female, young,
yearling, castrated male, to bear youngs, etc. in several IE languages. This precise and
specialized vocabulary is a clear indication that these animals have been known for a long
time to the speakers of these languages. In the case of the horse, no such situation exists and
1
The symbol <≈> is used for approximative “reconstructions” of unclear shape.
this is already a signal that the level of knowledge of the horse was not the same as with the
sheep and goats. The horse was a much less familiar animal and what is worse, none of the
words related to horses is a valid comparative unit.

≈H1eǩwo- ‘horse’

This “word” is the standard-bearer of the Proto-Indo-European horse. It is documented in the

following languages :

- Anatolian: hieroglyphic Luvian aś(u)was, pl. aśuwai ‘horse’, Lycian esbedi ‘horse troup’,
- Tocharian: A yuk (Gen. yukes), В yakwe ‘horse’ < (PT *yäkwe), possibly borrowed in
Turkish jük ‘horse-load’,
- Indo-Iranian: Sanskrit áśva-, avestic aspa-, Old Persian asa- ‘horse’; ossetic jäfs, Indian
dialectal form yāsp,
- Greek: hippos ‘horse’, without aspiration -ippos in compounds and dialectal form ikkos,
Mycenian i-qo-.
- Baltic: Prussian aswinan ‘mare milk’, Lituanian ašvíenis ‘stallion’, ašvà, dial. ešvà
‘mare’,
- Italic: Latin equus ‘horse’, Oscan names Epius, Epidius, Epetīnus,
- Celtic: Old Irish ech, Gaulish epo- (in Eporēdia, Epona ‘muliōnum dea’, etc.) ‘horse’ ;
Welsh, Cornish ebol ‘foal’ (< *epālo-),
- Germanic: Old English eoh, Old Norse iōr ‘horse’, Old Saxon in ehu-skalk ‘horse-carer’,

Apparently, this word seems to be massively established in about all the branches of the
Indo-European family. The problem is that nothing works in the semantic and phonetic
details. The first semantic hitch is that Armenian ēš (gen. išoy) means ‘donkey’ (not ‘horse’).
The next problem, much more acute, is phonetic. The proto-form “reconstructed”, if I dare
use that word, to account for the lexical data is a fiction:

- it contains <ǩw>, which is a graphemic device invented because neither *ǩ (> ś) nor *kw
(> k) can explain the sequence -św- of Indo-Iranian. Needless to say that this ad-hoc
graphemic device exists only in very few words. Moreover, since Meillet, it has been
suspected that the distinction between *k and *ǩ is a late and specific development of the
central Indo-European languages and that the distinction between palatals and velars did
not exist in the PIE language itself. The graphemic device <ǩw> is therefore highly
dubious in the first place,
- many items display irregular unexpected forms: Tocharian has an extra y-, Greek
(h)ippos and ikkos are nonsense (**epos or **etos are expected), Anatolian has the shape
of Indo-Iranian loanwords, etc.

The Indo-European data can be sorted out in five groups :

- *y-ekw > Tocharian *yäkwe, with extra *y-,

- *ekwo > Germanic *ihwo; Italic and Celtic *ekwo, apparently regular,
 - *aśwa > Indo-Iranian *aśva-, borrowed into Baltic *ašv- and Anatolian *ašuw,
- *y-aśwa > ossetic jäfs, Indian dialect yāsp, borrowed into Anatolian *esb-(edi), with extra
*y-,
- no coherent proto-form can account for Greek (h)ippos and ikkos. I tend to think that the
Greek words are multiple borrowings and tentative adaptations of a Tocharian-sounding
*[jəkw].

To that picture, it can be added that some of these forms have been borrowed into
neighboring languages, especially the Indo-Iranian forms:

- Georgian ačua ‘horse’ < Indo-Iranian *aśwa ?

- Andic *ičwa ‘horse’ < Indo-Iranian variant *yaśwa ?
- Xinalug pši ‘horse’ < Proto-Iranian *asp- ?
- Hurian (extinct, once to the east of Anatolian) aššu- < Indo-Iranian *aśwa
- Hebrew sus ‘horse’ < Indo-Iranian.

The obvious conclusion is that this “word” does not belong to the vocabulary of the PIE
language. We are dealing here with a set of post-PIE wanderworts, not with a cognate. This is
not a word that can be traced back and reconstructed for PIE. And to use the word in Mallory
(1997:101), the Greek words hippos, ippos, ikkos, i-qo, detectably and glaringly do not fit the
shape and correspondences that are found in the regular inherited vocabulary of Greek. It is
quite amazing that during the last two hundred years not a single Indo-Europeanist - V.
Blažek did, but he is more a macro-comparatist - seems to have ever emit a word of dissent
and doubt about that supposedly PIE “word” which is nothing but comparative garbage.
In the first major branch of the IE family, Anatolian, the word ‘horse’ is documented by
two different Indo-Iranian borrowings, *aśwa and the later typically Iranian-looking ≈(y)asp-.
In other subbranches, the situation is not better: Greek is an impossible word, Baltic is an
Indo-Iranian borrowing. This set of words is basically wanderworts and it is not easy to
identify the origin of these wanderworts. It has been suggested that they have a connection
with the regular PIE adjective *H1eǩu ‘fast-running, fast-flying’. From a semantic point of
view, this idea seems reasonable. In all cases, it only marginally addresses the issue of the
fictitious graphemic device <ǩw>. Anyway other Eurasian languages do not provide any
alternative. Another Germanic word *hang-ista ‘stallion’ is a superlative that can be compared
to Lituanian šank-us ‘nimble, fast’. And the other Germanic synonym *hros ‘horse’ can be
compared to the verb *kwer ‘to run’. These words support the theory that the regular PIE
adjective *H1eǩu ‘fast-running, fast-flying’ may be the ultimate origin.
At this point of the analysis, we can only state that these wanderworts may ultimately be of
Indo-European origin but it is hard to understand which of the IE languages actually coined
and spread the wanderworts to the others. The most obvious are those which did not take part
in the domestication of the horse: Greek, Anatolian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic received the
wanderworts for the others.

≈marko- ‘horse’
The next “word” is documented in the following languages :

- Germanic: Old English mearh ‘horse’ (whence ‘mare’), Old High German marah ‘horse’,
mariha > Mähre ‘mare’, Islandic marr ‘horse’, merr ‘mare’,
- Celtic: Irish marc, Welsh march, Breton marc'h horse’, Gaulish *marco- (in compounds),

As can be seen, the extension of this word is poor: only two branches. This has already
lead some prominent Indo-Europeanists like Meillet to conclude that such a limited extension
was to be explained as a borrowing from another undetermined language. It can nevertheless
be underlined that this word has the structure of the word *por-kos ‘(young) pig’. There is no
apparent problem in reconstructing a protoform *mar-ko-s ‘horse’. The problems start when
this word is compared to Siberian and Asiatic words with which a connection is obvious. In
fact this connection is at least three centuries old and already exists in Leibniz' works:

- Mongolian *mori(n) ‘horse’, massively represented in all Mongolian languages,

- Tungusic *murin ‘horse’, massively represented in all Tungusic-Mandschu languages,
- Korean *màr ‘horse’,
- Chinese 马 mă < *mraˀ ‘horse’,
- Burmese mòrong ‘horse’, and most other Tibeto-Burmese languages.

The first point is that *markos cannot be the origin of these Asiatic words. There is no -k-
in any of them. Once the Indo-European suffix *-ko (as in *por-ko) is removed, the next
problem is that *mar- cannot be the origin of these words either, because Mongolian,
Tungusic, Burmese, etc. show that only *mor- with vowel *-o- can be the original protoform.
The case of Korean and Chinese is ambiguous. The first vowel is lost in Chinese and it is
unclear if the Korean word is a wanderwort or not.
The conclusion is simple. The Siberian word *mor- was borrowed into only very few Indo-
European languages. Actually, only Germanic can have received that word as *mor- and
added -ko- hence *mor-ko-. Celtic itself is a borrowing of an already phonetically evolved
*mark- possibly of Germanic origin. This is indeed not an Indo-European word, as suspected
by Meillet, but a clear Siberian loanword, probably conserved in Germanic and transmitted to
Celtic later on.
Now that we have shed some light on the status of the loanword *mor- into Germanic, we
can try to understand the other impossible wanderwort ≈(y)eǩw-o. The Italo-Celtic *ekwos is
most probably a Germanic loan-word as well. This means that the languages which took part
to some extent to the domestication and spread of horses are limited to: Germanic, Indo-
Iranian and Tocharian. These languages must have been located to the east of the other Indo-
European languages at the time when the domestication took place and they are responsible
for the chaotic spread of several wanderworts. This situation will be confirmed by the other
loanwords that will be discussed right below.

≈kult ‘colt’
 This “word” has not been accepted as a possible PIE item in Pokorny (1959), but it is not
worse than the others. It is documented in the following languages:

- Germanic: English colt ‘a one-to-four-year-old foal’, Old Norse kult ‘foal, young man’,
- Indo-Iranian: Persan kurre ‘foal’, Indo-Aryan kišora ‘foal’ (< kiǩeul-),
- Hittite kurka ‘foal’, with Iranian phonetics.
- Mitanni Aryan: Kikkuli name of the author of a horse-training manual (ca. -1500 BC).

The rejection of this word is logical: the correspondence k ~ k ~ š ~ k makes little sense. It
should be: h ~ s ~ š ~ k. But it can noted that the wanderwort ≈(y)eǩwo ‘horse’ has been
accepted, when it is not better at all... This is another wanderwort and it documented in
Asiatic languages as well :

- Turcic *qulun, *qulum ‘foal’,

- Old Japanese kwoma ‘colt’, possibly from *kul-ma,
- Chinese has 驹 gòu ‘colt, poney’ < *kloH < possibly from *kulos.

This root *qul- is further attested in :

- Mongolian *qulan ‘donkey’,

- Tungusic *qu(l)ma ‘maral, Siberian stag’.

The conclusion is that the most probable provider of that wanderwort ≈kul to the other
languages is the Turkic branch of Altaic. It can be noted that no Indo-European language
could ever account for Altaic *qul with uvular *q and not *k. Curiously, the root *mor-
‘horse’ is nevertheless not attested in Turkic, so that the apparent provider of *mor- ‘horse’
seems to be the Mongolian branch of Altaic.

≈ka(:)p(H) / ≈ ko(:)p(H) ‘hoof'

This is another “word” (Pokorny:530) ≈ǩa(:)pho / ≈ǩo(:)pho, with a limited presence in the
Indo-European languages:

- Indo-Iranian: çaphá- ‘hoof, claw’, avestic safa- m. ‘horse hoof’,

- Germanic: Islandic ho:fr, Old English ho:f, Old High German huof ‘hoof’.

Unsurprisingly, the “word” is found only in Indo-Iranian and Germanic and nowhere else.
It does not seem to be attested in Tocharian.
We are left with the problem that there are in fact two reconstructions, one for Germanic
*ko:p-, one for Indo-Iranian *ǩopH-. Again, this word has nothing to do with PIE. We are
dealing here with two borrowings of Uralo-Altaic origin into individual IE branches. On the
Uralo-Altaic side, on the contrary, what we have is several well documented words which
apply to animals or human beings. The Indo-European wanderwort for ‘hoof’ appears to be a
specialized borrowing in relationship with horses of a Uralo-Altaic root which means ‘heel,
leg, paw’ in general.
The first derivative is *kˀoHpi ‘paw’:
- the Uralic word, Finno-Volgaic to be precise, is documented as follows :
- Finnish käppä ‘paw’; also ‘hand’, Estonian kapp ‘claw, paw, hand’,
- Mordvin Erzia kepä / Moksha käpe ‘barefoot’,
- the Altaic word *kˀoH-kčan ‘hoof’ :
- Tungusic *ko:kčan ‘hoof’.

Another one is *kˀaH-to ‘heel, hoof’ :

- Mansi (Vogul): käät (KU), käät (P), kot (SO) ‘leggings (of elks or (wild) reindeer)’
- Japanese kakato ‘heel’,
- Tungusic Orok gataja ‘hoof of deer’,
- Mongolian *qajir (< *qaH-ir without -t-) ‘to hit with the hoof’.

A third one is *koH(pi-n-)pisu ‘heel, shin’ :

- Uralic *koH-pisu
- Finnish käpsä ‘hare foot' ; Estonian (dial.) käps ‘heel, thigh’
- Komi (Zyrian): kïs (S V Pr) ‘skin of the shin of horses, cows or reindeers’,
- Khanty (Ostyak): köwǝl (V), kepǝt (DN), kepǝl (Kaz.) ‘skin of the paws of fur
animals’,
- Japanese kubisu < *kupi-n-pisu ‘heel’.

The Uralo-Altaic data suggest that the word borrowed into Germanic and Indo-Iranian was
*koHp- ‘horse hoof’, regularly transformed into Germanic *ko:p- > *ho:f- but metathesized
in Indo-Iranian as *ǩopH- > çapH-. Moreover, the variety of meanings and derivations in
Uralo-Altaic precludes the idea that the word could be of Indo-European origin. Moreover,
some forms, especially the Tungusic and Mongolian words, show that originally the initial
was *kˀ > *q. Japanese and Uralic do not distinguish *k from *kˀ (both represented by *k).
For that reason, the word cannot be a cognate between PIE and these Siberian languages. The
direction of borrowing is clear: Uralo-Altaic > Germanic and Indo-Iranian.
This word, present in Germanic and Indo-Iranian, is another borrowing of Uralo-Altaic
origin.

Conclusion

One of the temporally critical items that are supposed to peg the terminus ante quem of the
disintegration of PIE is the horse, the domestication of which is often attributed or supposed
to be known to the PIE speakers.
In the article I showed that the alleged domestication of the horse at the PIE stage is a
complete fiction. Nor did PIE speakers even seem to know the horse. The words related to the
horse: ≈H1eǩwo-, ≈marko- ‘horse’, ≈kul- ‘colt’ and ≈ǩa(:)pho-/*ǩo(:)pHo- ‘hoof’ are wander-
worts. They display erratic and anomic phonetic correspondences and three of them can be
traced back to Siberian Uralo-Altaic words with absolute certainty. Three subbranches of the
IE family are responsible for the diffusion of these wanderwords in the rest of the family and
beyond: Germanic, Indo-Iranian and Tocharian, which must have been in closer geographic
contact with the Uralo-Altaic people who are the real domesticators of the horse.
This clearly indicates that when the horse got domesticated the IE family was already split
and that the individual subbranches were already dispersed. Such a late dating as -4500 BC
for a still unified PIE is nonsense.

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