Through the strategy of ‘insertion’, a new meaning referring to a new signified is embedded into an existing lexeme. How an embedding lexeme is selected is still a matter of debate, and different cultures show different paths. However, the lexeme that was chosen by the Ancient Egyptians to introduce the horse is ḥtr — ‘team of yoked quadrupeds’. A few additional Egyptian lexemes may refer to horses by extension, but they are rare cases.

1.1.2 The lexeme ḥtr in the lexicon before the extension into the meaning horse

The most important recipient lexeme for horse(s) in Egyptian is ḥtr, ‘the yoked ones’ which describes two draft quadrupeds yoked to a plough. The word is known from texts since the Old Kingdom, and it frequently appears in proximity with the verb skꜢ ‘to plough’. The root ḥtr ‘yoke’ is known rather early (already in the Old Kingdom) to receive an extended metaphorical meaning: ‘tax’. The tax seems to be conceptualized as ‘the yoke on the back of the people.’ The yoked pair of draft animals were usually cattle, but rarely also donkeys (see below).

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In the Middle Kingdom, a rare example shows donkeys (DZA 27.540.830) instead of cattle as a classifier, thus exemplifying the ‘open door’ within the semantic core of the word for ‘a pair of (any) yoked draft quadrupeds’.

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By the New Kingdom, following the general diachronic trend in classifier development of all lexemes referring to cattle, the word ḥtr starts to take the [hide & tail] classifier (see below), instead of bovines, or in addition to bovines.

1.1.4 The new referential extension — the embedded lexeme ḥtr — ‘team of horses’

Ḥtr is the first lexeme that appears in the Egyptian texts by the end of the Hyksos period with a clear new reference to horses & chariot. The choice of this extension is both utilitarian and morphological. It anchors the horse in its utilitarian function as (part of a) ‘team of draught animals’, but also reflects a perceptual-morphological basis for the equation. Yoked animals are naturally domesticated and thus the horse in this version is inserted directly into the realm which we would call ‘domesticated quadruped’. or more specifically, ‘draught quadrupeds’.

1.1.6 The classifiers of ḥtr when referring to horse

As we saw above, the moment the horse was embedded into the lexeme ḥtr, the word became polysemic, with two very different meanings: ‘a team of draught animals (with a plough)’ and ‘a team of horses (with a chariot)’. The difference is manifested not only in the daily use, but also in the social context — mundane versus prestige.

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2.1 The introduction of horse into the Mesopotamian lexicon and cuneiform writing28

The horse was also a new arrival in Mesopotamia. There is no consensus as to when exactly horses were first introduced into the Mesopotamian world and cuneiform writing, but it was clearly known from the very beginning of the second millennium, i.e. earlier than the recorded finds in Egypt. The same challenge of incorporating the new animal into language and script faced the writers of cuneiform texts. In a stratified process, related to the different languages operating in the cuneiform script, we find the horse in the Sumerian-Akkadian lexicon in two forms: as anše.kur.ra = ‘donkey of the mountain’ and sisi an apparent loanword.

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The cuneiform anše.kur.ra is a clear case of overt marking of a referential extension. It is similar, for example, to the case of sheep which is called ‘cotton “deer”’ = stunimal chig in Tzeltal (Brown 1999: 28). Like the above case of sheep in the Amerindian language, anše.kur.ra is the name for the horse embedded in an animal of similar form and function – the donkey, while sisi is the loanword which is introduced into Sumerian and Akkadian, known in Egyptian as ssm or ssmt (see above).

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2.2 The Aztecs and the horse

In his book Kant and the Platypus, Umberto Eco approaches many aspects of the theory of categorization and classification. He dedicates a special, colourful chapter to ‘Montezuma and the horses’ (Eco 2000: 127–130). Basing himself on indigenous Spanish chronicles recording the event, he reconstructs the reaction of the locals to the arrival of the first horses to America with the Spanish invaders. The first messengers were sent to Montezuma to tell him of the landing and of the ‘… terrifying marvels they were witnessing ... one scribe … explained that the invaders were riding deer as high as the roofs of houses’ (Eco 2000: 128).

Nahuatl, the language spoken by Montezuma, is a special case in Latin America. It remains widely spoken in Mexico today. The language, however, is best known as the speech of the Aztecs who ruled large parts of Middle America during the Spanish invasion in 1519 AD. The Spanish promoted Nahuatl as a vehicle of administration. As such, textual materials written in Nahuatl using Spanish orthography were produced abundantly immediately after the conquest. As a result, unlike other cases, the post-contact history of Nahuatl is relatively well documented. We know that ‘horse’ was not unique in being embedded in an extended lexeme; other new-comers to the continent underwent the same process, such as totolin ‘turkey’ for chicken. Nahuatl is also rich in what may be called ‘coinage’, when a descriptive compound becomes the ‘name’ of the new item. Such an example is tentzone, ‘bearded one’, for goat.

Being under colonial rule, the local speakers probably became at least partially bilingual. The extended local maçatl ‘deer’ that hosted horse, is replaced by cahuallo, the Nahuatl version of the Spanish caballo. Yet, not all extended local lexemes disappeared. The extended Nahuatl mizton ‘little cougar’ = cat, for example, has not been replaced by a Spanish loanword (Brown 1999: 96).

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In Mesopotamia, we find an interlacing process. On the one hand, there is a clear lexical extension where the horse is embedded in a local, prototypical pack animal — the donkey. This kind of lexical extension into a ‘similar’ animal is identical in essence to the examples known from the languages studied by Brown. The animal was used for long-distance transfer and riding, and even pulled war chariots. The donkey is a closer, more accurate prototype for the horse than cattle. Like the donkey, the horse is not used regularly for meat consumption or for leather-goods production. However, the earliest occurrences of the horse, which are known already from the 21st century BC in cuneiform, show a sort of ‘blending’ — an embedding in anše donkey with the addition of the loanword sisi or zi-zi. These examples should testify to early encounters and linguistic contacts with some carriers of the loanword sisi. Spellings such as [anše]-zi-zi solve all problems of possible polysemy between donkey and horse.