Not to mention that the E-rune in Proto-Germanic was *ehwaz, horse.

@Ryodraco  

@Ryodraco  
And Clāfre sēo Ƿittiġe (Clover the Clever) had been an apprentice of Star Swirl.

@Background Pony Number 17  
That’s definitely a reasonable idea I think, given how the three main pony races are all presented as having had very distinct cultures before the merger, and that Old Ponish has thus far been heavily associated with unicorns.

@Ryodraco  
@digiman619
 
So, the question is, what happened in Equestrian history to cause Old Ponish to be abandoned/evolved into what ponies speak today? We have William the Conqueror to thank for changing Old English into Middle English thanks to his Norman knights introducing French into the Anglo-Saxon language at the point of a sword.
 
My best guess is Old Ponish is what Unicorns spoke in the pre-Equestrian days, while Pegasi and and Earth Ponies had their own tongues. (Offhand, and in keeping with the English analog, that would make Earth Ponies speaking something like Danish and/or Gaelic and Pegasi Latin/Greek/French.) The merger of the three societies recounted in the “Hearth’s Warming Eve” play would have resulted in the evolution of a hybrid language like English as the three races tried to communicate with one another.

Incidentally, Old Ponyish in Old Ponyish would be Eald-Pániṡċ.

Tolkien would be proud.

@Ryodraco  
It could be like how Latin was still the language that most colleges taught in for the longest time even though it was rarely if ever used outside of class.

Tǽtende

Awesome, but I still like the theory that Old Ponish was a pretty much dead language even in Star Swirl’s time, and he just used it for writing. Hence why Celestia and Luna don’t know it very well, they never used it much themselves.