Arabic

sīsiyy- - pony (AWSG 408)

Quoted as an Egyptian dialectal word (cf. BH 445), not attested in the available dictionaries of Classical Arabic. Arb. sws ‘to rule over people’ (BK 1 1164, LA VI 108) is often regarded as derived from the present root with a meaning shift from ‘to drive horses’ (e.g., Hommel 1879 45-6, 54); cf. especially Arb. Syr. sā́yes ‘take care of or heal a horse’ (Barthélemy 373)

Areal reconstruction

*sVwsVw- - horse (SED No. 199)

The Sem. terms listed below are commonly thought to be borrowed from an IE satəm-language, v. Gamkrelidze-Ivanov 1984 560, 914 (PIE *ek[h]wo- ‘horse’) and Tropper 2000 45 (with a special emphasis on Luvian azzuwa-). Within the framework of this hypothesis (quite promising as such), one should not disregard some difficulties as far as the word-structure of the Semitic terms is concerned: both the loss of the word-initial vowel and the reduplication are present already in the earliest Sem. attestations.