Conversation

I was thinking about the word "cavalier" earlier today, and how it's clearly related to French "chevalier" and Spanish "caballero", and those are from "cheval" and "caballo" respectively, but then I got stuck. They're Romance languages, but the Latin for "horse" is "equus", isn't it?

Turns out Latin borrowed "caballus", meaning "draft horse, workhorse" from an unknown language, but it was originally only poetic; it doesn't appear in prose until Vulgar Latin, where it replaced "equus".

Huh.