On 13 November 2010 08:03, Luke Bergen
<lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:
If you think about it, pony really shouldn't be a root word though. It's a baby horse. Should there is a special root word for "baby kangaroo" as well? Just because english decides that a word is important enough to warrant a two syllable word doesn't mean that it's logical.
Ponies are not baby horses, they are a special breed of horses, actually a subspecies of what we generally refer to as "horses". The relation between "pony" and "horse" is about the same as between "terrier" and "dog". But rats and mice are scientifically speaking not the same species - mice are members of genus Mus (with 30 known subspecies), rats are members of genus Rattus (with 64 known subspecies), while ponies are the same species as other horses.