Re: marko- = horse non IE ?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@...> 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.
>

Yes, but my point -which you haven't addressed- is this isn't a Wanderwort but a substrate loanword. 

The trap most scholars (including of course Blench) have fallen in is linking *marko- to Altaic *morV 'horse' instead of *n^argu 'young male deer/elk'. Apparently, it hasn't occurred to them that words designating the horse such as this one could be also applied to other species of ungulate mammifers (deers, elks, antelopes or even camels) of the Eurasian Steppes.

> 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
>

Reading this work, I don't think his author would qualify himself as a "long-range linguist". He's more an ethnologist than a true linguist.

Regards,

Octavià Alexandre