cavalcade

Note: The French word probably belongs with other loanwords dealing with military and equestrian matters taken from Italian in the late 15th and 16th centuries, though early instances may also derive from Occitan cavalcada, already attested by ca. 1300. — The earliest evidence for the etymon of caballus is a Greek personal name Kaballâs in a 4th-century b.c. inscription from Ephesus; kaballeîon "work horse" is attested a century later in an inscription from Callatis on the Black Sea coast of southeastern Romania. Neither the word nor any derivative became generally used in Byzantine or Modern Greek. Latin caballus is first attested in a line from a satire of Gaius Lucilius (2nd century b.c.), where it has a definite derogatory connotation: "succusatoris taetri tardique caballi" ("of a jolter, a foul, slow caballus"). In the Romance languages caballus displaced classical Latin equus (descended from the Indo-European etymon; see equine) as a neutral word for a horse, though the progeny of the feminine form equa continued in use in some areas as a word for "mare" (Old French ive, ieve, Spanish yegua, Portuguese egoa, Romanian iapă, etc.). As a loanword into Insular Celtic languages, caballus appears to have had a variant *cappil(l)us (whence Old Irish capall, Welsh ceffyl). Inviting comparison with caballus are a number of words more remote in phonetic form, which cannot be reduced to a single borrowed source: Old Church Slavic kobyla "mare" (in all Slavic languages, as Russian kobýla, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian kòbila, etc.; a loanword and not an internal Slavic formation according to Oleg Trubačev, Proisxoždenie nazvanij domašnix životnyx v slavjanskix jazykax, Moscow, 1960); kevel "well-bred fast horse" in the medieval Turkic dialect recorded in the dictionary of Maḥmūd al-Kāšġarī (11th century); Finnish heponen "horse," Estonian hobu, hobune.