From: john.w.kennedy@gmail.com   
      
   On 2015-07-03 04:30:22 +0000, Brian M. Scott said:   
      
   > 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    
      
   And the OED agrees with that, suggesting that the word may actually be   
   of Anglo-Frisian origin, from the same root as OE wíc, camp.   
      
   --   
   John W Kennedy   
   "But now is a new thing which is very old--   
   that the rich make themselves richer and not poorer,   
   which is the true Gospel, for the poor's sake."   
     -- Charles Williams.  "Judgement at Chelmsford"   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)