From: b.scott@csuohio.edu
On 3 Jul 2015 02:05:29 GMT, "John F. Eldredge"
wrote
in in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> On Thu, 02 Jul 2015 16:05:41 -0400, Brian M. Scott wrote:
>> On Thu, 2 Jul 2015 18:46:31 GMT, Dorothy J Heydt
>> wrote in in rec.arts.sf.composition:
>> [...]
>>> A Viking is a Norseman who lives on his farm most of
>>> the year, but once the crops are planted and he has
>>> nothing much to do till harvest time, outfits his
>>> ship, calls in his friends, and sails down the _vik_
>>> (fjord) to raid, trade, or both.
>> ( is 'inlet, small bay', not 'fjord'.) The
>> etymology of 'pirate, freebooter', later
>> 'robber, highwayman', is unclear. Derivation from
>> , with the original sense 'freebooter who lies in
>> wait in inlets', is one very reasonable possibility,
>> but there is also evidence against it: Old English
>> 'pirate' occurs already in the 8th century
>> applied to sea raiders on the Saxon Shore, before the
>> Viking period, and the apparently cognate Old High
>> German personal name also occurs in the 8th
>> century. There’s also an Old Frisian cognate or
>> borrowing with the sense 'pirate'.
[...]
> Also, Old English, Saxon, Old High German, and the
> Scandinavian languages are all linguistic cousins. So,
> it isn't surprising that a term cognate to "viking"
> would exist in all of them.
It’s not clear, however, whether the 'pirate' terms are
cognate or borrowings, and if they’re borrowings, the
direction isn’t clear. Moreover, the OHG personal name
could in fact be unrelated to the others. But the main
point of my comment is that the early OE word casts doubt
on the derivation of ON from ON
Brian
--
It was the neap tide, when the baga venture out of their
holes to root for sandtatties. The waves whispered
rhythmically over the packed sand: haggisss, haggisss,
haggisss.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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