'dog' vs. 'horse' in Native American languages
Why are dogs called 'little horses' in some Native American languages?
One of my favorite facts about Native American languages is the history of words for ‘dog’ and ‘horse’. After Europeans reintroduced the horse to North America,[1] horses quickly became a common feature of everyday life in many Native American communities.
What did Native American communities call these new animals? Many languages used words meaning ‘big dog’ or ‘big pet’:
-
Chitimacha
- kix dog
- qatin big
horse
Swadesh (1939: 73)
-
Inuktitut
- qimmiqjuaq qimmiq‑juaq dog‑big
horse
-
Plains Cree
- mistatim misi‑atimw be.big‑dog
horse
Wolvengrey (2001: 285, 335, 400)
Some languages in other areas of the world did the same thing. In Thai, for example, the words for ‘dog’ and ‘horse’ are related, differing mainly in tone.
-
Thai
Abugida IPA Tone Translation หมา /mǎː/ rising ‘dog’ ม้า /máː/ high ‘horse’ Google Translate
Back in North America, horses became so common in some areas that people no longer had to clarify what type of “dog” or pet they were talking about—a big dog (a horse) or a regular dog. They could simply say the word for ‘dog’ and others knew they meant ‘horse’. In other words, the default meaning of the word shifted from ‘dog’ to ‘horse’.
But this caused a problem: How did people clarify when they were referring to dogs specifically, rather than horses?
One common solution was to call dogs ‘little horse’!
One of my favorite examples of this comes from Navajo. Navajo originally had a word łį́į́ʼ ‘pet’. After the reintroduction of horses, the meaning of łį́į́ʼ shifted from ‘pet’ to ‘horse’. Then, to refer to dogs, Navajo speakers created a new word, łééchąąʼí, which literally means ‘shit-eating pet’, because dogs are known to eat shit!
When a word changes its meaning so that it no longer uniquely refers to the original concept, forcing speakers to create a new term for the original concept, that new term is called a retronym. Other examples of retronyms in English are:
-
Term Explanation brown rice all rice was originally brown dairy milk dairy milk used to be the only kind of milk dark chocolate dark chocolate used to be the only kind of chocolate hard cider all ciders were originally alcoholic
Fun bonus fact: The term retronym was coined in 1980 by the president of National Public Radio (NPR), Frank Mankiewicz.
📖 Recommended Reading
- American Indian languages: Cultural and social contexts (Shirley Silver & Wick R. Miller, 1998)
📑 Bibliography
- Swadesh, Morris. 1939. Chitimacha-English dictionary. In Morris Swadesh, Chitimacha grammar, texts, and vocabulary (American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Native American Languages, Mss. 497.3.B63c G6.5). American Philosophical Society Library.
- Wolvengrey, Arok (ed.). 2001. Cree: Words / nêhiyawêwin: itwêwina / ᓀᐦᐃᔨᐍᐏᐣ ᐃᑘᐏᓇ, Vol. 2: English–Cree. University of Regina Press.
📋 Footnotes
-
Horses were originally native to North America, but went extinct sometime between 15,000–10,000 BP. See Wikipedia: “Horses in the United States” for details. ↩︎
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