Etymology: cavalry

This morning I typed the word cavalry, and decided it was a weird word and needed to be looked up so here we are, the etymology of cavalry.

This is one of those words that comes to English from romance languages.  Middle French, cavalerie, and Italian, cavalleria and cavalliere, meaning “mounted soldier.”  It comes from the Vulgar Latin word for “horse,” caballus.

Side note 1: Old Latin called horses equus, which comes from an old PIE root ekwo-.  You’ll recognize this root in words like equestrian, hippopotamus, hippocratic, and even the word alfalfa.

Side note 2: alfalfa has a very interesting history as a word.  It comes to us from Spanish, but it came to Spanish from Arabic, and to Arabic from two Old Iranian root words, aspa- meaning “horse,” and -sti- meaning “food.”

Side note 3: the word horse, is a very old word and it’s unclear what its origin story is.  Some people think it’s a loan-word from the Sarmatian language spoken by the Sarmatians of ancient Iran.  They migrated northwest, eventually settling in the areas now known as Ukraine, Southern Russia and Poland.  It’s one of those words that sounds the same in many languages, regardless of their roots, even in the Uralic languages like Finnish which are super weird and not really like anything else.  The Finnish word for “horse or stallion” is varsa, which if you say it out loud, sounds a lot like “horse” spoken with a weird accent.

Ok back to cavalry.  So the Vulgar Latin word was caballus, which is thought to have been a loan-word from some long dead Anatolian language, and originally it meant specificially, “work horse,” but it somehow caught on and became just the general word for “horse.”  B sounds often morph into V sounds over time, so from caba you get cava and then cavalier, and then cavalry.  Cavalier used to mean, “gallant, knightly, brave,” but then came to mean “easy, offhand and disdainful.”  Funny how words do that.  The surname Chevalier, and the word chivalry, come from this word.