Horses are one of the most intelligent and beautiful animals on Earth. They have faithfully served people for thousands of years. These animals come in all sorts of colors! But it’s even more interesting to understand how the names of these same suits appeared in Russian, what they mean, and how to determine what color a horse is by the name of the suit.

This work is dedicated to the colors of horses and the etymology of the words denoting them (integrated work: Russian language and biology).

On the one hand, “mukhorty”, according to V. Dahl’s dictionary, is “nondescript, short, frail.” But this definition refers to a person. But for a horse, “mukhorty” is the name of the color.

What is the color of a horse, and why the names of the colors are often not entirely clear to us. I tried to figure it out.

Horses have interested me for a long time. At first I just admired the horses. We spent every summer in a village in the Tver region. There was a big herd there. The horses walked where they wanted and often entered the village. They climbed into the gardens and feasted on apples and carrots. They came to the river to swim and drink. And how beautiful and unusually white horses appeared on the road in the evening, as if growing out of the fog!

And in Moscow, my meetings with horses were not rare. The windows of our apartment overlook the Moscow Hippodrome. Moreover, in that part of it where the stables and “carousels” for walking racing horses are located. It happens that in the morning a horse neighs cheerfully, and you can see how it runs or calmly walks (depending on its character) in a circle.

In addition, quite often the guys from the riding school ride horses along our street. This is done in order to accustom horses to noise.

I have also seen more than once how a mounted police regiment goes out on duty. All the horses in it, as if by choice, are black and bay. Only one horse - dapple gray.

I grew up. I became interested in drawing. And, of course, I began to draw horses.

At first it was cartoon horses. And a little later, the real ones. But in order to draw any animal well, you need to know as much as possible about it. And cartoons about horses were replaced by feature films and documentaries, books about these beautiful animals, both fiction and popular science, reference books and special literature about horse breeding and how to draw horses correctly. So I learned a lot about horses.< /p>

Horses are one of the most amazing animals in the world. These are graceful and fast creatures. FKNAKODUSA is considered the very first ancestor of the horse. Outwardly, it resembled a small animal the size of a fox with a striped skin. He lived about 70 million years ago in North America. Horses remained just as unattractive 20 million years later. The height of the horse's ancestors did not exceed 20-50 cm, a small head, a humpbacked back, striped coloring and multi-toed paws.

But gradually the ancestors of horses moved from impassable wilds to the plains. Their legs lengthened and became stronger, and the middle toe began to turn into a hoof.

People domesticated horses a long time ago. Previously, these animals were used as a means of transportation and for transporting goods.

With the development of technology, these functions of the horse are dying out, and more often you can find a sports horse (race horse). Although there are places where it is impossible to survive without a horse: mountainous areas, impenetrable wilds of the taiga.

Perhaps no other animal species has such a number of breeds and such a variety of colors (colors) as horses.

Some experts believe that a horse's color determines its physical qualities. For example, horses of light color are less hardy and more sickly than horses of other colors: red, bay. Red horses are more stubborn and strong, just like animals of black color.

There is some truth in this statement. The topic is quite interesting, but it requires separate consideration.

Obviously, despite the similarity of colors, the frequency of a certain color among horses in Europe and Asia differs. In Europe, red and bay horses predominate, while in Asia, gray horses predominate.

What is a horse's color? The color of horses is determined by the color of the hair coat, consisting of short coverts and long protective hairs (mane, tail, brush or frieze). In addition, the signs of horses include markings - congenital white or dark spots and stripes of various sizes on the head, legs, and body.

There are more than 30 colors of horses, the main ones being black, bay, red and gray.

Where did such strange suit names come from? This is perhaps even more interesting than everything else related to horses. It turns out that East Slavic horses were quite small and not hardy enough. Therefore, since the 10th century, horses were imported to Russia from Central Asia, Persia, and Hungary. These horses already had names based on their color. These foreign words were transformed into Russian ones.

The BULAN color appeared in Russia in the 16th century from Kyrgyzstan, and there the ELK is called “BULAN”, because this color is very similar to that of a moose. I'm completely sorry and understandable.

But the name “BURN” came to Ancient Rus' from the Turkic languages. In Turkic “BUR” is red-red. In turn, this word comes from the Persian "BOR" - red-brown, which, in turn, goes back to the Indo-European bher, which means shiny, light brown. And by mixing these concepts, we get BROWN COLOR.

The name of the RAVEN suit is also explained quite simply - from the Druid “CROW” - shiny black.

The word BAY is derived from the word “rot” - v. slav = “to kindle.” Those. it is a dark red color like fire.

In the Turkic language, “game” means “red”, “red”. Hence the name of the suit - GAME.

ISABELLA suit is a very light color, almost white. The word was formed from the combination of the prefix “iso” and the root “bel”. It is assumed that the word has a common structure with the words “black, yellow, blue.” Moreover, one of the subspecies of the isabella color is GENERAL - yellow-white.

KARAKOVAYA. If you remember the familiar word “PENCIL” from childhood, the name of the desert “KARAKUM”, then the origin of this word will become clear. In the 16th century, this word appeared in the Russian language along with horses brought from Central Asia. "kara" in Turkic languages. Means “black”, and “kula” means “brown”. This is how the word “KARAKUL” came about, which later became simply KARAKOV.

The BROWN horse has been found in Russian monuments since the 19th century in the form “KARY”, which again recalls black and brown shades.

RED is a word of common Slavic origin, i.e. found in almost all Slavic languages. Compare: in Ukraine they say: rizhy, in Belarus - red, a Bulgarian will say the suit rizh, in Slovenia they say rizi, in the Czech Republic - ryzi, and in Poland - ryzy. And in each language this word will mean yellow-red.

SAVRASY. It is unclear where this word came from. But many experts believe that it was borrowed from Turkic languages ​​since sapsary-sari means yellow.

The MUSCLE suit gets its name directly from the color. The color of ash and ash is the color of a gray mouse.

The piebald horse was obviously brought to Russia from Hungary, because the roots of this word are in the Croatian language: “piet” - spot, or “pegavi” - spotted. In general, relatives of the word “piebald” can be found in all Slavic languages. In Czech – piha, and in Polish – piga – freckles. In the ancient Russian language, “pgyiy” is leprosy (a disease characterized by spots and ulcers on the face and the whole body. In Latin pingo - I write with paints. And in the ancient Indian - pingar - yellow, brown-yellow. So, wherever you look, everywhere this word is associated with spots. And what could be more spotted than a pinto horse?

And only a DARK horse can be more spotted. In fact, the origin of this word is unknown, but it is known that in Indo-European languages ​​skeu is a bunch, a tuft. But it’s true: against a dark background, light spots look like tufts or tufts of other fur.

The word SIVIY is also of common Slavic origin. But in each language it has its own connotative meaning. So in Ukrainian siviy is gray-haired, in Czech sivak is gray-gray, in Lithuanian sivas is the color of mold. But in India, sya-va means brown, bay. So it turns out that gray is a grayish-brown color, as if covered with mold.

But perhaps the most interesting origin of the word NIGHTING. And not only the origin, but also the relationship with other words. The Indo-European base of the word solov is the same as the word nightingale.

NIGHTINGING in literary language means “yellowish color” and “lethargic, sleepy.” There is even an assumption that the name of the songbird is connected not only with its color, but also with the fact that when it sings, a person relaxes and becomes lethargic. At the same time, this word has the stem sol, which in ancient German, Irish and Latin means “dark, dirty.” The word “owl” has the same stem. So determine what kind of suit it is.

The word CHALY came into the Russian language, obviously, along with horses. It is found in monuments of the 16th century. In the Turkic language, chal means gray.

The origin of the word MUKHORTY as the name of a horse's color is unclear. But here’s how V.I. explains the meaning of this word. Dahl: “.., about the horse: bay with yellowish tan marks on the muzzle, legs and groins; about a person: weak, frail, skinny and short. Mukhortinky, nondescript, small man. Mukhortik is a short, frail person. To be arrogant, to be arrogant. Mukhorchataya (beard) - mokhorchaty, in mohairs, disheveled, in strands. The horse's snout is shaggy, shaggy."

It becomes clear why people who are far from horse breeding often do not know or simply confuse the colors. They are called by color: black - black, isabella - white, fly, mouse, gray and savras - gray, etc. After all, the names of many colors indicate not the color, but the shade of the color, various spots, tan marks, etc.

Among the various colors, my favorite is red. When the horse has a reddish-brick color head, legs, body, and the mane and tail are golden.

Most often, this color is found in East Siberian and Chinese horse breeds, so it is difficult to find it in our area. But I was lucky.

In that very village herd that I spoke about at the beginning, a red horse, Ruslan, stood out among the horses. Tall, stately, he looked very elegant, but at the same time powerful. His fur glistened, his muscles played, and his mane fluttered in the sun and looked like streams of golden water.

It cost him nothing to go “through the fence” to any site where there was something to profit from. And how beautifully he ran ahead of the herd across the meadow!

This topic turned out to be so interesting: the etymology of words denoting the colors of horses.

As a result of this work, I learned that most of the names of horse colors came into the Russian language “together with horses” from different parts of the globe. Some of them are ancient Slavic words, the meaning of which is no longer always clear to us, and some were formed in comparison with a color well known to Russian people. And dictionaries helped me with this: etymological and explanatory, a dictionary of foreign words, the Internet site “Planet of Horses” and many other sources. And, of course, thanks to this work, I learned a lot of new and interesting things about horses. It turned out that horses appeared in Russia from different parts of the world and brought with them new words into the Russian language, that these animals, depending on their habitat, have their predominant color (color).And that the color of a horse often affects its character, performance and even the health of the animal.

But that's a completely different story...

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