EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



As the Teutonic languages have thus adopted 

 new words to designate the horse, so the modern 

 Romanic languages have generally forgotten 

 equus and substituted for it the name which 

 appears in French as cheval and in Italian as 

 cabalky and from which we have obtained such 

 words as cavalry, chevalier, and chivalry. An- 

 cient Greek and Latin both had this word ca- 

 ballusy which, as kobyla, is the common name 

 for a horse in the Slavonic languages, and ap- 

 pears also in Irish as capall and in Welsh as 

 ceffyl. We do not find any such name in San- 

 skrit, but in the Kawi of the island of Java, 

 which is a non- Aryan Malay language, as full 

 of Sanskrit words as English is of Latin words, 

 we find the horse called capala y and side by side 

 with this we have in Sanskrit the adjective 

 qapalay "swift." The Sanskrit quite generally 

 corrupted Old Aryan ^-sounds in this way, as 

 we corrupt Latin sounds in English when we 

 say serebrum and Sisero instead of kerebrum and 

 Kikero ; and I have no doubt that in this word 

 for " swift " we have the explanation of caballus. 

 Curiously enough, the modern Greek has also 

 dropped the classical name for the fleet-footed 

 beast, and substituted aXoyov, which means 

 " unreasoning," and in former times was applied 

 to brutes in general. It is quite remarkable 

 that there should have been such vicissitudes 

 in the career of the words which describe so 

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