i've notice that a lot of animals have both a slavic name and a turkic name.
конь comes from slavic roots while
лошадь comes from turkic roots.
Speaking of horses, it took me some time to realize that there are 3 other words for them in Russian:
Кобыла - a female horse (mare),
кобылица - a version of it for a young one (filly);
Жеребец - a male horse (stallion);
жеребёнок a version of it for a child-horse regardless of gender (foal, colt)
Мерин - a gelding (and also a name for Mercedes cars, probably due to the fact that both start with "mer-" and you can comfortably ride both).
While
лошадь is more a generic name for a horse (also meaning a mare, same as "кобыла") that is more broadly used as such,
конь is more often seen in military contexts, like in "По коням!" ("Horse!" - at least that's what my dictionary gives for a command to cavalry men to get mounted). The cavalry itself is called "
конница" (apart from the loaned name "кавалерия") and the cavalryman is called "
конник" (although this name seems to be increasingly out of use since cavalry became obsolete on the battlefields; the names "всадник" (mounted [man]) and "наездник" (rider) remain for civilian horseback riding).
Also,
конь is commonly seen in composite words, like:
-
коновязь - a hitchrail; a tethering to "park" your horse at in front of a saloon
;
-
конокрад - a thief that will hijack you horse from there while you're drinking;
-
коновод - the guy who was supposed to watch your horse in your absence (a valet?);
-
конюшня - a stable.
Also,
конина for horse meat.
whats the present Russian for 'pork'?
Свинина. Not sure how it is related to German "Schwein" but the relation is too obvious to be not there in "свинья" (a female pig, at least domestic; I am not sure about the wild one but it feels like that one too). A domestic male pig is "боров" (seemingly related to "boar") for a sterilized one or "хряк", which well might be common with other Slavic languages.
Wild pig is "кабан".
Also I've heard that before that Ukrainian is in many cases closer to Czech then to Russian. Interesting...
May very well be so. But, mind you, both Ukrainian and Belorussian do sound quite archaic to a Russian ear.
Moreover, during my car trip to Prague, I realized that while I can understand both spoken and written Belorussian (although it is hard to find there as they routinely use Russian), I cannot follow a verbal conversation in Polish though I can read Polish and get the overall idea with an effort. In Czech I can do neither: too few words are recognizable to get the whole meaning.
So, I guess that Czechs and Russians are just standing on the opposite sides of Slavic-speaking area with the middle part understandable to all and the opposite edges having linguistically gone too far away from each other.
Also, in Montenegro I found it to be even easier than Ukrainian: there's no way I could reproduce either but in both I understand what they talk about (if they talk slowly, or I get lost behind) and can read.
we need to have a slavic language convention...
