Silly, perhaps, to find inspiration for an entire concept of horsemanship on a word from an ancestral language, long gone, that you have to explain to everyone how to pronounce.  Kjrsos another word for Horse.

Kjrsos -  Think kearrr-zoes

Our inspiration comes from a long-ago-dead foundational language that we might be taking some liberties with.

With a name like mine, I do feel a kinship with the word Kjrsos, and perhaps Kjrsos will also go through its life with people not quite knowing how to pronounce it. The naming of Kjrsos, though, somehow considering it is thousands of years old, has a richness, has a history that goes back as far as when we first bonded with the horses, when we first came together, to be something better together than we could be apart. This is where and when the partnership began. There is power in that.

To share how to pronounce Kjrsos, we need to start with the very first letter, which actually can be represented as an accented K, which is not something easily found on our keyboards.

Ḱḱ

So Kjrsos is our phonetic spelling of Ḱrsos, one of the words used for the horse by our ancestors in a language that existed when our bond began. 

We chose a phonetic spelling, one we can represent that accented k more easily.

Two because no one knows for sure how they would spell it in a written language, as there was none. 

Three, we are sure there would have been variances if there had been. 

Four, because the first letter is actually accented.  The K accented is still only used in the Slavic Macedonian Language.  And the keyboards of today do not include the accented K.

There are assumptions being made on how this language was spoken, as this language came long before the languages we know today, it was never written down and doesn't exist today.  The language has been brought together by linguists based on the languages that came afterwards.

The first two letters represent the accented K, the K is sometimes seen as accented with a j.  This gives the K a very distinct sound. Think of how the j sounds in Spanish, such as in the name Jesus, which sounds like a y, and you get the idea. So we add the sound of that to a k, followed directly by a trilling r.  Note some spell this as Ḱrsos.  You can listen to our best guess hear of what Kjrsos sounds like. Very similar to the name Kirsten.

Silly perhaps to name a site or an entire concept of horsemanship on a word that you have to explain to everyone how to pronounce.  But when we went to name the site, we were not happy when the words we used were English, because what if we were talking to someone who is French or German, Polish or Armenian, Spanish or Portuguese.

We wanted to use a language that spoke to everyone  And we found PIE - which stands for Proto-Indo-European.  The language that came before French and German, English and Italian, before Spanish, before Greek, before Latin, and yet all these modern languages are based on what came before. 

This language is the common ancestry of so many of us all around the world today. It binds us through time, through the development of other words that came to mean the same thing, through the times in history that the horse was a part of our civilization every step of the way.  

Then, on a personal note, no one could ever say my name properly. The naming of my birth, Nadja. And interestingly enough, it has that same concept of the "j" in it.  How many people could say that?  And somehow, if my mother is to be believed, this magical j changes the d to a t sound and the j to a y sound, which is interesting.  So I feel a kinship with the word Kjrsos, and perhaps Kjrsos will go through its life, with people not quite knowing how to pronounce it.

Our connection to our ancestors, to all of those who came before, who made us possible, who joined together with the horse for thousands and thousands of years, that connection, that story, that history, lives in the word Kjrsos. 

There is power in that connection.

There is power in naming what we do after the horses.

There is power in acknowledging the power of the horses in what they can teach us.