Comment by acadapter
21 hours ago
It is linguistically possible that "viking" was simply a self-referential ethnonym, with the first part meaning "home" or "village".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
Compare Ancient Greek [w]oikos, and all the various ves, vas, wieś, which can be found all over Eastern Europe.
Sounds rather far-fetched. “Viking” only started getting used as an ethonym in the 19th century. In the sagas it it only used in the meaning of raider, pirate or outlaw. The etymology of “vik” (bay) is much more plausible.
The first part of the word viking, or vik simply means "bay" in nordic languages
Yes, but similarity alone is not a guarantee that words are related. The words val and [h]val are not related in Swedish, even though they ended up with the same pronunciation and spelling in the modern language. Sometimes, words can end up as "fossil words" because the main usage of the word was lost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word
This can also happen to word roots. Because this is about a historical word, it's interesting to look at the broader Indo-European language tree for clues about the original meaning.
The even firster part "vi" means "we" though.
And vi was an outgrowth of ex, which was an improved version of ed, which in my experience, roughly translates to ‘ugh’.
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I don’t think -kingur is a suffix in old norse. It is not a suffix in modern Icelandic, and I can’t think of any suffix like that.
In fact I don‘t remember a suffix which attaches to a pronoun. In modern Icelandic at least we like to introduce more pronouns or conjugate them rather then to suffix or prefix them.
If the word was broken as vi-kingur, I think the modern Icelandic would be við-kingur (or við-lingur), which is simply not a word in the language.
webay hmm. they started a trend
Do we have any historical source of people referring to themselves as vikings?
I don’t speak old norse but I speak Icelandic natively. Víkingur simply means Bay-er, that is somebody from a bay. As an Icelander living in America I experience the English word “viking” as an Exonym for my identity. In Iceland we use “Nordic” or “Scandinavian”, both terms are inclusive of Finns, Sámi, and Greenlanders, so strictly speaking this is not an Enthnonym.
In Icelandic, at least to my knowledge, we have never used Víkingur as an ethnonym (well maybe during a sports game, or among right-wing nationalists). It has always meant raiders. In 2007 there was even a new word dubbed Útrásarvíkingar meaning businessmen who made a bunch of money doing business abroad (buykings would a clever translation of the term).
EDIT: I just remembered that the -ingur suffix can also be used to indicate a temporary state e.g. ruglingur (confusion) and troðningur (trampling [n.]), and was used as such e.g. að fara í víking (to embark to a viking) so víkingur could also mean, a person that embarks to a bay.