--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Octavià Alexandre <oalexandre@...> wrote:
> I see no plausible semantical connection between 'horse'
> and 'market'... Rather than "highly tentative", I find your
> proposal "highly unlikely". Of course, dogmatists prefer pseudo-
> etymologies like this one rather than admitting loanwords into their
> sacred IE. IMHO, *marko- 'horse' has zero probability of being a
> native IE word.
Indded, it has long been suspected to be a Central Asian Wanderwort.
See now the ingenious (but, I am afraid, quite fanciful) explanation devised by long-range linguist Roger Blench to account for the attestation of the term *marko- 'horse' in Celtic and Germanic only (of all IE languages of Europe):
http://tinyurl.com/39xk3ot
The author's views on the transmission history of this word are visually represented in Map 1 on p. 7 ("Old World distribution of the #m-r-(N) root and its possible diffusion"). He seems to favour a trasmission to western Europe (Celtic) from North Africa (Berber). The intermediate source of the loan, in his hypothesis, would be Proto-Semitic *muhr- 'foal' (not mentioned in Blench's article, but see L. Kogan at <
http://tinyurl.com/32wmuuy> -- p. 271 and n. 56).
I must also say that Berber (Siwa) agmaar 'horse', which Blench indicates as the possible closest and most recent source for the transmission of this word to western Europe ("contact with the Maghreb through the export of horses could have been responsible for the presence of this root in Celtic and thence across the North Sea to Germanic", p. 7 in the pdf), is regarded by some linguists as a reflex of the Proto-Afroasiatic root for 'camel', g-m-l :
http://tinyurl.com/3xnfvvh
Hence, this Berber term for 'horse' may not be cognate at all with Arabic muhr 'foal'.
Kindest regards,
Francesco