From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 111
Date: 1999-10-26
----- Original Message -----From: markodegard@...Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 1999 11:08 AMSubject: [cybalist] Cowpokes and Centaurs.In American English, 'cowpoke' is a familiar nickname for a cowboy (a real cowboy is a man who handles cattle out on the range as a profession, or at least, someone who would like to (someone like me, who spent some very formative years in Elko, Nevada)).Now. Someone tell me I'm wrong. But, looking in the IE-index of the American Heritage Dictionary, I see *kent, 'jab', 'poke'. 'Taurus' of course means 'bull'. The Greeks portrayed the centaurs as horse-men, not bull-men.
The identification of of 'centaurs' as 'riders' is an old one. The Aztecs are reported to have spoken of conjunct creatures resembling centaurs, upon seeing the Spanish invaders. The Greeks no doubt did the same thing.
The fact that the Greeks gaves us centaurs suggests they were a mixed people, remembering their ancestral IE-myths as much as they remembered the horror of first seeing a cowboy running yahoo-wild through their Bronze-Age village.
Allowing for the semantic change of 'cow' to mean 'any of the species Bos taurus', 'cowpoke' perfectly translates 'centaur'.
Dear Mark,It is a brilliant idea, and unless you should find out that somebody has already hit upon it, the etymology is certainly worth publishing. The fact than *kent- occurs in the AHD index does not mean much in itself; there are many ghost-words in such lists (no offence intended: that particular one is one of the most reliable). But kent- is also a classical Greek root. It occurs in the verb kenteo: meaning 'prick, goad, spur on' (sounds like a summary of a cowboy's life) or, by semantic extension, 'sting, stab'. It also occurs with prefixes: parakenteo: 'pierce, poke at the side', perikenteo: 'pierce on all sides', sunkenteo: 'pierce or stab at once'. So far, so good.A critic might object that Ken(t)-tauros is an unlikely formation, since kenteo: is a thematic verb and the whole vowel-final stem, rather than the bare root, is the expected form in verb+noun compounds. But a -tVtV- sequence in a compound would be a very likely target of haplology (deletion of one of two successive syllables if they sound similar). Actually, there is a beautiful precedent involving kent-: the agent noun kento:r 'goader' developed from the regular derivative *kente:to:r by haplology! This argument seems strong enough to remove the most serious formal objection to your etymology. A less serious one (the bull ~ cow contrast) remains. I haven't seen enough cowpoking or cowpunching in my life to judge if bullpoking is something entirely different or not. Certainly in Greek tauros can't mean 'any specimen of Bos taurus' but refers very specifically to the male. Perhaps the Greeks had some perfectly good reason for calling pastoral horsemen bullpokers rather than cowpokers. Can you think of any?Piotr