Night-mare: on the origin of a trope in Celtic and Germanic (a response to Stephen Pax Leonard)

Abstract

Abstract This paper has been conceived as a response to Stephen Pax Leonard’s article “Hipponyms in Indo-European”. The idea of contrasting names for ʽhorseʼ in the ‘language of the gods’ and the ‘language of men’ certainly seems interesting. Nevertheless, empirical diachronic study of the use of the relevant terms in Continental and Insular Celtic is conducive to a different hypothesis. Analysis of the cognates of PIE *márkos in Germanic and Celtic makes me propose the idea of semantic convergence between *markos and the name of the female demon *mara as a result of paronymic attraction.