Gaulish Warriors and Finnish Shoes

OIr. cing ‘hero’ and cingid ‘steps (marches)’ are reflected in the aristocratic Gaulish name Cingetorix ‘king of marchers (warriors), heroes’. These Celtic tokens, altogether lacking in Italic, have sometimes been considered reflexes of IE *(s)keng- which appears in Classical Sanskrit as khā̆ñjati ‘limps’ and in Greek as σκάζω ‘limp’. It has also been argued that late prehistoric Germanic borrowed a Celtic *kanxsto- ‘stepper, trotter’ (or the like) which it deployed in equestrian terms; so, for example, Old English hengest, hengst ‘gelding, horse’. The pejorative ‘limping’ sense of IE *(s)keng-, which is still maintained in German hinken, was mistakenly thought to have been ameliorated in Celtic allowing cingid to express ‘to step, proceed go, stride, march’. Here, however, it is shown that, other than in loans from Germanic, Celtic lacked reflexes of IE *(s)keng-. It is then demonstrated that Celtic *keng-, as in OIr. cingid, was derived by dissimilation of IE *g̑hengh- ‘to go, stride, ride’. Finally, it is remarked that Proto-Finnic borrowed Proto-Germanic *skenka- < IE *(s)keng- and adapted it as *kenkä > Finnish kenkä / kengä ‘shoe/boot (anything resembling a shoe in function, a heavy boot … for walking or striding in snow)’.