“Interesting”

Many years ago, I came across someone whose signs and symptoms could only be interpreted as something serious, and the way I put it was that I couldn’t think of an explanation for their symptoms that wasn’t serious. Actually life-threatening, but I didn’t say that. It was while I was still training, so I wasn’t sure if it was just lack of experience, but in fact it did turn out to be very serious and they died a few months later. Now this blog is not about herbalism, so this might seem a bit off-topic, but sometimes things which are serious are also interesting, and this bothers me because it makes it seem like I don’t care about the people affected by it. It’s possible to broaden this. For instance, shortly before Ceausescu was assassinated (there should be a cedilla in there somewhere, and this is what I mean), I became interested in the Romanian language. It seems kind of cold somehow to do this. On the other hand, the world needs people to be interested in things in that way.

It’s been said that the world needs psychopaths, because for example they might make good surgeons. It probably wouldn’t be a good thing for a surgeon to wince with empathy every time she makes an incision. On the other hand, she then needs to explain the need and the outcome of an operation to her patients, and this ought to be accompanied by a good bedside manner. You can’t win really. Both kinds of people are important, or perhaps I should say that both kinds of attitudes are important.

I expect you know where this is going. Yeah, the Ukraine. More specifically, the similarities and differences between the Russian and Ukrainian languages. Because I couldn’t help noticing on televised interviews from the Ukraine that I could understand bits and pieces of what was being said even though I hadn’t learnt Ukrainian, and in fact I couldn’t tell if the people in question were speaking Russian or Ukrainian. When I looked up the words I recognised, it turned out that the two languages are very close to each other.

Here’s a diagram to explain this:

This image is absolutely lovely. Nonetheless it will be removed on request.

Right now, the relevant bit is the cluster of dark red circles at lower right. These are the Slavic languages. Ukrainian, Belarussian and Russian are East Slavic. Lexical distance is a measure of similar vocabulary, that is, either words which both mean the same thing in the languages concerned or are somewhat similar. It may or may not include faux amis, I’m not sure.

I’ve done something similar with the Romance languages, where I found that Portuguese and Castilian were the closest and Romanian was the outlier, as is reflected in this diagram. However, Catalan has been said to be the most central. There is clearly a linguistic continuum affecting many of the Western Romance languages, and also Western Germanic, where German blends into Dutch. Scots is missing from the Germanic cluster here. Speaking of languages spoken in Scotland, another linguistic continuum is Gàidhlig-Manx-Irish, and there’s a gap in this where Galwegian Gàidhlig has become extinct. The reason I mention these is that they’re more familiar to me than the languages of Eastern Europe because I’ve never been outside my Hexagon.

It’s worth doing a grainy pixelated zooming-in on the Slavic languages:

My attempt to learn Russian rather pre-dates my later flurry of interest in languages. Russian appealed to me because it had a different alphabet than usual, although it was less exciting than Arabic which can’t really even be written properly in the Latin script. My interest was further boosted by my adolescent Stalinist phase, of which I would say the following: many of the boys I knew at school got into fascism and the NF, and most have hopefully left that long behind. I got into Stalinism. I am no longer Stalinist and haven’t been since 1984 CE. Also at that time, I was aware that the grammar school in my city offered Russian, although I wasn’t at that school but a bilateral, and there was a Russian course on BBC2 on Sunday mornings I followed for a while. Also, I learnt a little Polish, and also felt very drawn to Serbo-Croat because it had a reputation for obscurity. I was using the ‘Penguin Russian Course’ primer, and it was the first time I had seriously attempted to acquire a second language, unless you count the French we did at school. Unfortunately schooling had managed to suck all the fun and interest out of French in a variety of ways, such as giving detention for not being able to remember the conjugation of «être» and promising a trip to France, which was just across the way since we were in East Kent, leading to both fluency in and hatred of French lasting decades, which I’ve only just got past. But the thing is, apparently you cannot extricate fluency easily from your brain, so I’m still fluent in French, and my Russian comprehension is slightly better than what they call “post-beginner”, and has sat there since my childhood with practically no progress since, or much practice. There are sadly several languages which have languished like this in my mind, a particular sadness being Gàidhlig. However, I do know enough Russian to make out little bits of conversation and more text, and there are also many loan words from German, Latin and Greek origins which help. There’s also the occasional cognate with other Slavic languages.

Ukrainian is close to Russian but also quite close to Polish, something I didn’t appreciate until recently. My Polish really is not good even though a family member is Polish. The situation is complicated by the fact that some Ukrainians mix Russian and Ukrainian in their speech, and of course some Ukrainians speak Russian as a first language. Listening to Ukrainian reminds me of the experience of hearing Norwegian and understanding it without realising it isn’t Swedish, except that my grasp of Slavic tongues is quite a bit weaker than that of Nordic ones. So would it be fair to say Ukrainian is intermediate between Russian and Polish? I don’t know.

Looking at the other Slavic languages on that diagram, it’s notable that Serbian and Croatian are two blobs in contact with each other. This is because they’re basically the same language, to a much greater extent than is usual for very similar related languages. Serbo-Croat is just the same language written in a different alphabet with different spelling. Bulgarian and Macedonian may be similar but I’m not so familiar with the latter. I do know it wasn’t an official language in the early 1980s CE. In fact, I get the impression that in general, Slavic languages tend to be closer to each other than Germanic or Romance languages are and that identity politics is particularly important in making distinctions between them. Czech and Slovak, for example, are said to be closer than English and Scots.

There are routes between the clusters. One of these is between English and French, and I’m sure we Anglophones can perceive that ourselves. In the case of Slavic, these are between Slovene and Albanian, Polish and Lithuanian, and Ukrainian and Hungarian. This last is quite unexpected because Hungarian is a Uralic language not at all related to any of the Indo-European ones. Although Hungarian is a Uralic language like Finnish and Sami, it’s by no means close to any other language in its family except Mansi and Khanty, which are spoken thousands of kilometres away in Siberia. The distance between it and Finnish has been described as similar to that between English and Farsi, bearing in mind that Farsi has been described as “the English of Asia” because of its grammatical simplicity. Hungary and the Ukraine share a short border and the Hungarian language has a small number of Ukrainian loanwords but several times as many from Russian, so I don’t understand why the link has been made here.

The Baltic languages are another matter entirely. They have been lumped together with Slavic but in fact they’re not particularly close. There used to be a third, more conservative Baltic language called Old Prussian, not related to the German dialect. Lithuanian and the language I call Lettish but most other people now call Latvian are the most conservative of all widely-spoken Indo-European languages. There are a very small number of people in religious communities who have Sanskrit as a first language, which would be even more conservative. Lettish is Lithuanian with Estonian influences, more or less, which is interesting because it’s thought that Germanic languages are the result of proto-Indo-European influenced by an ancestor of Estonian, so either Lettish is distantly related to English or both languages went through parallel evolution due to similar influences. It makes sense that Lithuanian would have things in common with Polish owing to the fact that the former used to be a major East European country, and included Kyiv.

With the exception of Bulgarian, and therefore presumably Macedonian, the Slavic languages are grammatically similar. They tend to have three genders, although Polish has an extra one for male persons if I remember correctly, around six cases and perfective and imperfective aspects to their verbs. That is, there would be a difference between “drink” and “drink up”. Slovene, uniquely, retains the dual number throughout its inflexions. Bulgarian is special in a number of ways. Firstly, it forms the model for Old Church Slavonic, a liturgical language which is the most primitive recorded Slavic language. Secondly, it was the origin of the Cyrillic script, later to be adopted into other Slavic languages and beyond. Thirdly, it was written at one point in a unique script called Glagolitsa which seems to have been deliberately invented in such a way to obscure its origins. Fourthly, it’s a Balkan language, sharing features with other only distantly related languages such as a definite article suffix (the only Slavic language with an article). Fifthly, it has the most reduced case system of any Slavic language, with I think only two cases. Finally, it’s possibly the only Indo-European language with evidentiality as part of its grammar – that is, verbs are marked according to whether the sentence is hearsay. There are probably some other unusual features which have slipped my mind.

Bulgarian is also influential on all East Slavic languages due to the influence of religious texts. Just in case I haven’t said, East Slavic languages include Ukrainian, Russian, a little-spoken language called Rusyn, and Belarusian. Old Church Slavonic, that is, basically Old Bulgarian, was the liturgical language, occupying a similar position in East Slavic society as Latin did in Western Europe, meaning that it was used as the higher register, again like Latin. This means that as with the Romance languages, and in a different way in English, there can be two sets of words, one posher or more learnèd than the other, but noticeably similar.

During the Tsarist Era, the languages were all seen as varieties of Russian, but nowadays they are considered to be four different languages, three of them associated with a nation. There will also be pairs of dialects sandwiched between them, intermediate, so very “Russian” Ukrainian on one side of the border and very “Ukrainian” Russian on the other for example.

The differences, as I understand them, are fairly minor. Russian misses out the copula and Ukrainian doesn’t. This, along with the absence of articles which is usual in Slavic languages, makes Russian sound a bit like “note form”. Oddly, Russian at least is apparently not pro-drop: it uses subject pronouns even though its verbs are heavily inflected for person or number. I don’t know if Ukrainian does this. Ukrainian also pronounces “o” in the full form even when unstressed. The Russian tendency to pronounce «Г» as «Х» is fairly closely reflected in Ukrainian, which has a voiced H like Czech and uses that letter to represent it. It therefore also has «Ґ» for /g/. Spelling is more phonetic. Ukrainian palatises more. Politically, Russian is also a semi-official language in some other countries which used to be part of the Soviet Union, whereas Ukrainian is just its own national language.

Cyrillic script is, unsurprisingly, named after someone called Cyril, a Greek saint who brought Christianity to the Bulgars. At the time, it was common for languages in the Eastern Med to adopt a slightly modified Greek script. This includes Gothic, Coptic and the single surviving sentence of the earliest Romance language, “τορνε, τορνε, φρατρε”. Old Church Slavonic did the same, in something like the ninth Christian century. In this case, as well as Greek letters, there were also modified Hebrew letters and the occasional Glagolitsic character. Cyrillic has since been adapted for languages over much of Eurasia, Slavonic or not, and most written languages in the former USSR used it. There was a policy of introducing different letters for the same sounds pursued in Soviet Central Asia in order to make rebellion against Moscow more difficult to coördinate by disrupting written communication, which has led to some strange choices in some languages such as “&” being used for a particular vowel in one Turkic language. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, several of the newly independent states adopted Arabic script for religious and nationalistic reasons. In the USSR itself, few languages were written in anything but Cyrillic. The Baltic republics used Latin, Armenia and Georgia had their own scripts, the Jewish communities used Hebrew and certain isolated Siberian communities had a pictographic system where entire phrases were communicated by means of diagrams. Due to its use in very diverse languages, Cyrillic has a potential store of letters able to represent probably the majority of sounds in spoken languages except for clicks.

Cyrillic, Greek and Latin form a closely-related family of scripts used to write the majority of the world’s languages. Each has its own distinctive features. Greek today is, as far as I know, only used to write one language. Latin is of course the world’s most widely used alphabet. It could be argued that Gaelic is a separate script but it’s more like a calligraphic and typographic style of Latin. Cyrillic is exclusively used in the former Soviet Union and associated states such as Outer Mongolia, and in the Balkans. The division between Slavic languages which use Cyrillic and those using Latin is the same as the historical division between Orthodox and Roman Catholic countries. Although it’s strongly associated with Russian, in the same sense as English uses the Latin alphabet, Russian could be said to be using the Bulgarian alphabet, although it’s modified in Russian, as is the English version of Latin with its J, W and V.

The script is distinguished in several ways. One is that it has fewer ascenders and descenders. Since this is one of the major differences between capital and lower case letters in English and Greek, there isn’t much distinction between those in Cyrillic other than their size. There are some, as with «p» for example, and there are also little “ticks” on some letters such as «ц». The italic and cursive versions of the script bring some surprises. For instance, «т» and «и» are written as we would write “m” and “u”. The ideal of Cyrillic handwriting closely resembles our own copperplate style, and I was initially impressed and fascinated by its beauty, but everyday cursive handwriting has a reputation for being practically illegible, even to thoroughly literate native speakers of languages using that script. It basically looks like a scribble of arcades. The problem is that many of the letters are composed of similar elements, including й, ц, ш, щ, п, л, ч, м, и and т, which is almost a third of the alphabet of thirty-three letters. My own Cyrillic handwriting is in two styles. One of them is printed and looks similar to printed Russian, but the other has an interesting hangover from my Marion Richardson days. To digress briefly, I initially learnt Latin cursive twice and then modified it. My initial style, which was more like the cursive most English people use (I don’t know about Wales, Scotland or Ireland), Marion Richardson, was practically illegible and I was asked to go back to printing. A couple of years later, I learnt to write in italic, which I later rounded off. My Cyrillic handwriting has the same issues as my Marion Richardson, which is that it’s difficult for me to make small neat loops because I tend to continue to move the pen in the same direction as the loop after I’ve finished it, and Cyrillic depends more on loops than Latin cursive, particularly to link the letters, and consequently my writing doesn’t stay horizontal and wanders all over the page. So my Cyrillic is as illegible as others’, but not for the same reason. Therefore, most of the time I just print it. Typing in Cyrillic is just “hunt and peck” for me and is incredibly slow. This is because Russian typewriters have a completely different layout to QWERTY and also have more letters, whereas Latin alphabet typewriters and also those for some other languages which don’t use Latin script tend to be close to QWERTY. I’d be interested in knowing the history behind this.

Cyrillic seems to give the impression to readers of the Latin alphabet of homogeneity, where a text in the script tends to be assumed to be Russian. It is certainly true that the language is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world and the most common language to be written in that script, but it can sometimes mislead. 155 million people speak it as a first language, whereas Ukrainian is natively spoken by only thirty-five million. Belarusian is spoken by considerably fewer, estimates varying between 2.5 and six million. Rusyn is spoken by six hundred thousand people, which is slightly less than Welsh, largely in the southwestern Ukraine and Slovakia. It started to become distinct only five centuries ago and wasn’t written down distinctively until the late eighteenth century. I know practically nothing about it.

The romanisation of Cyrillic is different in different Latin script languages. The English version tends to use “H” and apostrophes to indicate palatisation, and strikes me as ugly and cumbersome, and also rather too “English”. German has the amusing practice of transcribing «щ» as “schtsch”, so seven letters corresponding to one in Russian, and Castilian uses the letter J to represent «x», so for example it writes “Khrushchev” as “Jrushchov”. American and British English also transcribe the Russian “E” differently in some circumstances, with American using “O”. I romanise Russian in my own way which I imagine is similar to how Czech and Serbian write their own languages. Serbian I chose because Serbo-Croat uses both alphabets and it’s easier to work out what’s what on the whole. I do the same with Ukrainian, but until now it’s never come up. Hence I would write “Zelenskij”. It’s difficult to type what I actually write romanised Cyrillic as because it’s my own invention and there’s no keyboard layout corresponding exactly to it.

There’s been an issue about the use of Russian names for Ukrainian things until recently. The Ukraine became independent in 1991 and the decision to adopt official Ukrainian spelling for proper names was made in 1995, but until probably this year, Western mass media and other organisations have continued to use the Russian versions, or transcriptions thereof. This is most evident with Kyiv, which was written “Киев” until recently. This reminds me of how the German Ocean was renamed and various places and names, not least that of our royal family, in connection with German hostilities in the last century.

The actual Ukrainian alphabet I’m not that familiar with. I’m aware that it uses the letter “ï”, which is accompanied by “I” and therefore probably represents a sound which occurs only after other vowels. The other distinctive feature I’m aware of is the use of a rounded “E” for the Russian “E” and the presence of “E” for the non-palatised version, which means that the “backwards” “E” is absent from the script. It lacks the hard sign. I suspect that a lot of this is to do with palatisation or the lack thereof, which brings me to my final comment.

I feel very strongly that Q-Celtic orthography is highly defective. Manx attempts to adopt English spelling but only represents pronunciation poorly, and Irish and Gaidhlig use extra vowels to represent the same kind of phenomenon as occur in Slavic languages with what are called “broad” and “slender” letters. Gaidhlig also uses a grave accent which is difficult to type easily. All of this could be circumvented by simply writing the languages in Cyrillic. I realise this is never going to happen, but the script has an elegant and simple way of writing the differences easily and without confusion. However, Q-Celtic words don’t even take advantage of this when transliterated into Cyrillic. They generally just use the anglicised version and change the letters accordingly.

All that, then, is “interesting”, but it doesn’t alter the fact that it’s come to mind due to a serious and tragic turn of events. I suppose it’s important for people to be interested in such things so they can be useful to others, but I often feel somewhat guilty about it. Maybe that’s misplaced.

Stripy Horses Or Plain Zebras?

Yes, I know what’s happening in the Ukraine. This is what’s stopped me from blogging. Before I get going on this subject, I want to explain why I haven’t said much about it. The truth is that my limited knowledge of the matter leads me to fear saying anything which might turn out to be ill-judged or crass. We all know it’s happening. My response to it, like many other issues, is to engage in what I hope is a helpful manner but also to recognise that there is a lot else going on in the world at all times, and there’s a rôle for escape. For what it’s worth, I’m thinking about Putin’s odd association between a country with a Jewish leader and Nazism, and the psychological influence being a long-term leader has on the person in that position. Even so, I am going to talk about zebras.

There’s a saying in medicine that if you hear the sound of hooves, you should conclude it’s horses and not zebras, which obviously makes more sense in Europe than in certain parts of Afrika. One of the shortcomings of my cognitive style is that I will tend to think of zebras more than horses and then wonder why everyone else hasn’t thought of that. In the context of medical diagnosis, this might mean I’m more likely to think someone has Lewy Body Dementia than Alzheimers or Paget’s Disease of Bone than arthritis. This is, however, self-correcting and doesn’t constitute a huge problem, because in herbalism one can address more than one possible diagnosis at once without necessarily doing harm. Also, it isn’t my job to diagnose, which is a responsibility legally enshrined in particular offices, none of which are mine. That said, I do need to have a firm grasp of disease processes to address them.

But this is not the other blog, so I’ll broaden that to something which is in fact relevant to the current Eurasian situation. If a first-language reader of a language with a Latin script such as English sees a page of Cyrillic text and is mindful of the adage that if you hear hooves, expect horses, they’re quite likely to presume that the passage is Russian rather than, say, Ossetian. However, Cyrillic has been used to write a wide variety of languages and it may not be Russian. This, of course, would arise in the case of the Ukrainian language, since a cursory glance from someone unfamiliar with the details of the differences might think the text was Russian. This is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Ukrainian:

Всі люди народжуються вільними і рівними у своїй гідності та правах. Вони наділені розумом і совістю і повинні діяти у відношенні один до одного в дусі братерства.

And this is the same in Russian:

Все люди рождаются свободными и равными в своем достоинстве и правах. Они наделены разумом и совестью и должны поступать в отношении друг друга в духе братства.

For the record, in English this reads:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Since I’m much more familiar with Russian than Ukrainian, having abortively attempted to learn it in the late 1970s and early ’80s CE, the first text looks foreign to me, and in particular its use of the letter “i” seems very incongruous. The two languages are quite similar, and I wonder if the differences would be perceived as a little like those between Scots and English. That is, is there a tendency for Russian speakers to regard Ukrainian as merely a dialect of Russian? Historically there has been. This might sound quite abstruse in the setting of the conflict, and I’m aware too that many Russians won’t consider this war as done in their name, but it does impinge on English media in one particular aspect: the name of the capital city.

I’ve long considered the name of the capital of the Ukraine to be «Киев», but in fact that is the Russian version. The Ukrainian, and therefore correct, name of the city is «Київ», and at this point I’m also wondering about Ukrainian punctuation – do they use guillemets like Russian or something more like inverted commas? The Romanisation of the name is now “Kyiv” in English, whereas it has formerly been written “Kiev”, the Russian pronunciation. Is it important to focus on this with all the other stuff going on? Well, probably. The spelling and pronunciation of placenames in the Ukraine has remained stubbornly Russian in the international news media even though the country became independent from Russia in 1991 and the name of the capital was officially changed in 1995. This politicises the name. It once again reminds me of Scottish placenames, which in that case is further complicated by the presence of the Gàidhlig language and its nationwide promotion by the Scottish government. Speaking of which, when I laboriously ploughed through a Russian tweet yesterday (not “labourious” – there’s another one), I found myself, as I often am, reminded of Q-Celtic languages in the dual pronunciation of many of the consonants, leading me to feel very much, once again, that they could really benefit from being written in Cyrillic script. But it ain’t gonna happen is it? Another illustration of the politics of scripts.

But this post wasn’t supposed to be about the Ukraine but horses, asses and zebras. Note that I put horses first in that list. Conceptually, we often have a tendency to separate marked from unmarked concepts in our language and thought, so I clearly regard horses as the unmarked concept in that list. Also, asses are apparently less exotic than zebras to me. There is some justification for that because a zebra, visually speaking, is literally marked, but there are other aspects to this. For instance, in Western Eurasia, where I live, horses are more familiar and widespread than zebras, and this is basically down to human exploitation of them. Historically, the exploitation of horses is vastly important and the domestication of the horse is a necessary pre-requisite to that. I feel unqualified to comment on the issue of veganism and horses because I’m aware of disparate views and my own encounters with them are somewhat limited, though also a lot more extensive than the average contemporary Western urbanite because I grew up in the country, used to hunt sab and have been on a lot of demos with mounted police present. It’s odd to think that up until a little over a century ago, these animals would’ve been an everyday part of life for most people in these isles regardless of where they lived.

I’m aware also that I’m thinking rather in terms of a binary opposition between zebras and horses rather than a ternary one between horses, asses and zebras. I can’t help thinking, though, that zebras and asses have a lot in common compared to zebras and horses, such as their tails and manes being more similar. I don’t have a firm impression of how large zebras are either, and I’m aware that there are three species of them and just talking about “zebras” generically is fairly vague.

But the question I’m working up to is this (actually there are two): Is a horse a plain zebra, or a zebra a stripy horse? It could equally well be, is a donkey a plain zebra or a zebra a stripy donkey? I should probably also explain why I’ve been calling them asses. The reason for this is that donkeys to me seems to refer to the domesticated species, but there are two other species of ass who are wild. I’m not being frivolous here, incidentally. My question is, are the extinct ancestors of today’s equines primitively stripy or primitively plain? Or did they have a different appearance than either of these? It seems to me that we assume in many pictures of prehistoric equines that they were primarily plain, although some have stripy portions of their coats. When we do this, are we being “horse-centric” or is it based in science? Are zebras the unusual ones? How could we find out?

The other question also sounds nonsensical but isn’t: is a zebra black with white stripes or white with black stripes? This doesn’t seem to make sense until you see one of the unusual individual zebras who are the other way round than usual, and at that point you realise that it is in fact normally a particular way round. Right now, I can’t remember which. But this is a secondary point.

Equines are members of a declining clade, that of odd-toed ungulates or perissodactyls. This order’s heyday was back in the earlier part of the Cenozoic and includes the largest land mammal ever, the Indricotherium, which shows convergent evolution with the giant sauropod dinosaurs of the Mesozoic. Nowadays there are the relatively widespread equines, the rhinos and the tapirs, and so we’re in the peculiar position of having a small order with one or two extremely populous species, namely the donkey and horse, a couple in the middle and a relatively large number of species who are largely recently extinct because of us, or severely endangered for the same reason. However bad the domestication of the horse and donkey may have been for individual members of those species, it’s turned out to be good for their survival as species.

Domestic zebras don’t happen. This is because they don’t meet six criteria making a species suitable for this, which incidentally humans may have done themselves – we may ourselves be domesticated. These criteria are that they must:

• Eat food that’s easily available where humans live.
• Reach maturity quickly.
• Don’t panic easily when startled.
• Be docile.
• Breed easily in captivity.
• Have a social hierarchy.

Zebras only conform to some of these. For instance, they do graze like horses but they’re quite aggressive. They’re unpredictable and have been known to attack humans. The same is true of horses but to a much lesser degree. This seems like a good adaptation for resisting being dominated by other species, such as ourselves, but ironically it seems to have led to them becoming much rarer than horses, or perhaps staying at a similar level of population for longer. Remarkably, one of the effects of domestication is often that the animals resulting have black and/or white patches, so the fact that zebras aren’t but are still black and white is interesting.

One problem with working out whether they were primitively striped or not is that fossil horses are of course just bones and teeth on the whole. I’m not aware of either frozen or tar pit equines, although they may exist, so the problem is they tend to be fossilised in such a way as not to preserve skin or hair. There’s another issue too. It may not be a question of stripes versus plain so much as the distribution of the stripes or the presence of other patterns. There are melanistic zebra foals with white spots on a black background, as it were. It seems there could be several ways of working out what happened when.

Zebras are stripy for a reason and the question arises of what selective factors might have led to this. Perhaps surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to be connected to protection from large predators. They can be smelt by lions and other carnivores from further off than the stripes would make a noticeable difference to their appearance. It’s thought that the real reason is to confuse biting insects, which is also the cause of their tail anatomy, which acts as a fly swatter. Asses have the same kind of tails. Therefore, is it possible that the stripiness or otherwise of an equine could be related to their tail anatomy? Not entirely, since asses are not striped, but horses are the ones with divergent tails and zebras and asses both have the original in that respect. However, these are only two of a dozen and a half theories about this.

Just to answer the question of whether zebras are black with white stripes or the other way round, zebra skin is black and it’s an adaptation for some of their coat to appear white, so they are black with white stripes rather than the other way round. This becomes evident when you see a zebra who is striped as a “negative” of the common type, because they actually look like white animals with black stripes. There are also three living species of zebras with slightly different skin patterns: Grévy’s, Mountain and the Plains Zebra. They’re in a subgenus referred to as Hippotigris, and there are two others, the asses in the unsurprisingly named Asinus – these have three living species, two of whom are Eurasian and one Afrikan. Finally, there’s the horse itself, presumably in a subgenus called Equus, and although there are two subspecies of these, namely the tarpan and Przewalski’s horse, the latter has a different number of chromosomes, so I don’t understand why it’s considered the same species. European horses, now extinct, were also a separate species, and some of these were piebald, as can be seen in cave paintings. Przewalski’s horse and the ancestors of modern domesticated horses diverged during the last Ice Age, roughly in Crô-Magnon times. It may be that the tarpan and Przewalski’s horse are the same species and horses a separate one.

There used to be a fourth subgenus: Amerihippus. Unsurprisingly, these are American, and in fact horses originally evolved in North America although they died out before Columbus. Once again, the presence of horses and their possible domestication in America might have made a huge difference to the course of history, but of course nobody knows if their temperament was more like zebras or horses and asses, and of course whether they were striped, plain or something else. There are Pre-Columbian native figurines of horses. It used to be thought that American horses were wiped out during the last Ice Age, but in fact they seem to have survived it. Genetic studies have shown that there were horses unrelated to those introduced by Spanish settlers in North America, and only two years after Cortez arrived, there were people on horseback in the Carolinas, even though meticulous paperwork recorded that none of the horses brought by the Conquistadores had escaped or been otherwise lost. There is a political element in the idea that American horses died out in the Ice Age, because it makes it seem that anything worthwhile was introduced by the Europeans. However, this does still raise the question of why horses seem to be so much more important in Eurasian cultures than Native American, and also makes me wonder if their ancestors had always been in America. Native American dog breeds are remarkable in that although they are still of the same appearance and behaviour as the breeds present before the Europeans, they are actually now entirely descended from Old World dogs. How this happened is a mystery. Native American horses today can have curly or very long manes compared to Old World horses. They are also sometimes piebald. More remarkably, some of them have slightly stripy legs! This, I think, is a clue.

The other hypotheses regarding zebra stripes include the idea that they create cooling convection currents by forming alternating hot and cold strips of air, that they help zebras recognise each other and that they’re warning colouration for what are apparently quite aggressive animals. If these situations apply to North America at the time the ancestors of today’s Afrikan zebras left, it’s feasible that they were already striped.

It’s said that the reason for the long manes and hairy tails of horses is connected to the North American climate. If this is so, it would be expected that their ancestors wouldn’t have had these before it became quite so harsh. It seems that the cold of the Ice Ages led to horses evolving these features, and in fact Przewalski’s horses have spikier manes than the more familiar horses, although their tails are still similar. As mentioned previously, the Palæarctic and Nearctic zoögeographical realms are sometimes united into a single Holarctic realm, consisting of North America and Eurasia, and the mammalian and other fauna of this vast region, comprising fifteen percent of the planet’s land surface excluding Antarctica, is shared between the two continents, such as wolves, bears, formerly woolly mammoths, beavers and so forth. However, of course there are differences – coyotes spring to mind very close to being wolves but not quite – and the question arises of whether the North American horses are the same species as Eurasian horses. I presume that if they couldn’t breed true, this would’ve been noticed by now, so the alternatives seem to be that native North American horses are either hybrids with Eurasian horses with some North American horse DNA, just as some Homo sapiens have Denisovan and/or Neanderthal DNA, or that the horses in question have always been two subspecies. The former possibility is particularly interesting because of the presence of faintly striped legs among them. If this is from a separate species of native North American horse hybridised with Eurasian horses, maybe that species was more obviously striped.

I’ve largely ignored asses in all this, which is probably a mistake. I do have the impression, and it’s just a hunch, that asses and zebras are closer to each other than zebras and horses. One reason I think this is that there are native Afrikan asses but no native Afrikan horses. Zebras are smaller than horses at around a dozen hands and weigh from 250 to 450 kilos. Adult plains zebras can be as little as ten hands and Afrikan wild asses actually slightly larger. It’s easy to get hypnotised by the apparently central, “standard” equines we’re familiar with in Europe and ignore a possible alternate route of zebra ancestry.

So, to conclude, this is what I think, and this isn’t based on genetics. It’s scientifically established that equines are essentially American animals. Incidentally, there also used to be native South American horses which I’ve ignored for the purposes of this post. The original members of Equus had coats of various colours and patterns, including piebald, black and different shades of brown. Some of these had faint stripes, and these traits were widely distributed through the first species of the genus, Equus simplicidens, also known as the American zebra and found in Idaho, Texas and presumably other places. They’re supposed to have looked like this (the one on the left):

I don’t know what the reasoning behind the idea that the American zebra was striped is. I do know that the apparently most basal population of humans, the San, has considerable genetic variation in skin tone so my conclusion is that the American zebra was probably quite variable but had a brown and fawn striped variety. I also wonder if the South American horses were a lot more like zebras due to living in similar climates to today’s Afrika south of the Sahara.