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What Do You Call a Horse?
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WHAT DO YOU CALL A HORSE?
I have always been fascinated by the world of words Why this word for that thing, what is the difference between this and that and things like that. Long before I went to school my parents had taught me to read from the cartoon bubbles in the Sunday comic strips. Not that I could understand everything that I could pronounce but I could puzzle out just about everything in the comics. It was my chore in most of the little towns where we lived to go down to the drug store on Sunday morning (if it was a town where the drug store opened on Sunday) and buy a newspaper (hopefully a Denver Post because it had many more comics than the Amarillo paper) and then to rush home and crawl into bed with mother and Dad and get their help in reading the funnies—every word of every comic.
At some time when I was a child I gained a low opinion of the Arabs because I read somewhere that they had 26 different words for "Camel". I remember thinking that was pretty stupid. ,After all a camel was a camel unless it was a dromedary just like a horse was a horse. But as I grew older I began to realize that a horse was not just a horse and maybe the Arabs were not so stupid after all. After a little study I decided that a horse could be referred to in at least 23 different ways
and still be within the bounds of the English language. To wit:
1. HORSE; the generic name for the beast. This is from the Low German "ors" and Middle Dutch "hors". The word first appeared in English in 725 AD as "hors" in the folk tale "Beowolf".
2. STALLION: Male horses kept for breeding purposes. From the Old German "stall" (hence our pen in the barn) through Old French "estalon" and into English as "stallion".
3. STUD: From Old Middle Low German "stot" and it originally referred to any horse male or female kept for breeding purposes. The restriction of the term to mean only males did not occur until 1803. The modern German word for "mare" is "stute".
4. MARE: A truly mixed up word in the 1200s. First there was the Old English word "merh", the West Saxon word "myre", the Old Frisian word "merru", the Old German word "marha" and the Old Icelandic word "Merr". All of them meant a female horse kept for breeding purposes and from one or all of them we got our English word "mare".
5. Filly: A very young female horse not yet of breeding age. From Old Norse "fylja". By some racing venues today a filly is any female horse less than five years old.
6 Gelding: From Old Icelandic "gelda" meaning "to castrate". Technically the term gelding can be applied to any domesticated male animal that has been castrated but it is commonly used only for horses.
7. Foal: From Old High German "folo" meaning "to give birth". Now applied in modern English to recently born young horses.
8. Colt: From Proto-Germanic "kultaz" meaning "child". Young camels by the way are called colts.
9. Pony: From Scottish "powny" and probably introduced into Scottish from Old French "poulain" meaning "foal". Latin "pullus" also meant the young of any animal (hence "pullet".In modern English I think that the word also connotes a horse of small size as well as a young horse.
10. Bronco: Interesting word. It is from Spanish word "bronco" meaning a rough piece of wood with the knots protruding. I can imagine that word being used to describe a horse after riding it across the American Southwest all day. In American Spanish I think that it also connotes an untrained horse as well as a "rough" horse.
11. Mustang: From Mexican Spanish word "mestengo" meaning an animal that strays and may be wild or ownerless. Also believed to have ultimately derived from the Spanish term "miscere" meaning "mixed".
12. Percheron:
13. Clydesdale:
14. Belgian:
15. Arabian:
16. Shetland:
17. Thoroughbred:
18. Tennessee Walker:
19. Quarter Horse:
20. Pony Of The Americas: Twelve through twenty are different breeds of horses and could be used to refer to a specific animal or to differentiate between horses. "He arrived riding his Quarter horse." makes perfect sense.
21. Roper:
22. Hazer:
23. Bulldogger:
24. Cutting Horse
25. Jumper: Horses can also be differentiated by specific skills they have been taught and trained to. A contesting roper would not think of roping a calf from a trained jumper horse so calling a horse by its training or "occupation" can also be a legal differentiation.
So there you have 25 different things that you can call a horse in English and the Arabs with their snooty camels have only one more than we do. Now I am sure that I have missed one designation and that you can think of one more different thing one could call a horse. Let me know so that we will be just as meticulous about our horses as the Arabs are about their camels.
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