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.
So it was a job, but one you apparently got by being born in the right place
It’s well known, to the point of near-cliche, that the word “Viking” didn’t refer to a nationality or ethnicity. It meant something akin to “raider”. The ethnic group is usually referred to as the Norse, at least until they start differentiating into the modern nationalities of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.
The actual finding here seems to be the discovery of the remains of some Viking raiders who weren’t ethnically Norse. Fair enough. There are also examples of Norse populations assimilating into other cultures, such as the Normans and Rus. Likewise, the traditionally Norse Varangian Guard accepted many Anglo-Saxon warriors whose lords didn’t survive the Norman conquest. So it’s not too surprising that someone of non-Nordic descent might be accepted into a Viking warband.
The Roman Empire at times extended all the way from England to the Persian Gulf. It included various Celtic people, North Africans, people from the Balkans, Turkic people and people from the Middle East. At no point did these people become ethnically homogenous but they all very much Romanized.
The British Empire spanned the globe.
In more modern times the Austro-Hungarian Empire included a dozen or more ethnic groups and languages.
Would we describe being Roman, a Briton or an Austro-Hungarian as a "job"? I don't think so.
> And comparing DNA and archaeology at individual sites suggests that for some in the Viking bands, "Viking" was a job description, not a matter of heredity.
The new (to me, at least) idea here is that the different regions of Scandinavia didn't mix as much, "on the job" or genetically, as I thought they would have. They each carved out their own territories and mixed with the local population, but not with each other to a significant degree. It's surprising to find that more genetic material was making it's way back to parts of Scandinavia from those far-flung regions than from neighbouring Scandinavian countries.
Poor Sven just liked maps but they kept making him come along on their “excursions”.
I guess the Normans were also of Nordic descent but they had given up the Viking way of life a century before.
I think this is the articles point. We would not consider being Roman a job, but we would consider being a Legionary a job.
The article is arguing “Viking” is more “Legionary” than “Roman.”
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.
Strange, being in North America, I've yet to meet anyone identify themself as having viking blood, but we refer to Scandinavians as being of viking ancestry all the time.
It's a kind of cosplay-lite for the masses.
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.
they do romanticize their ancient past as one of conquest and domination over others.
btw, even without the viking aspect, norse law was pretty strange in that it allowed murder for a fine. there is definitely a savage aspect to white tradition as there is to any modern culture, but there is a lot of whitewashing thats done to present anglo saxons as racially superior, highly civilized culture.
Where did you hear it? I am sure at least one out of hundreds of millions of Americans claimed it. But you know, we have people who think the earth is flat, as well. But by that token one can take any dumb thing someone from a large group said and sort of say “why do all X say this one dumb thing”
At least from my experience I only heard people claim Scandinavian ancestry. Or even more specifically a country like Norway or Sweden for example. Places like Minnesota or Wisconsin have a lot of that.
If you're American, it doesn't make as much sense, because Scandinavians and Germans have been coming to America for hundreds of years.
That's not that surprising; figures like Caesar and Genghis Khan are still being worshiped today. Hell, most famous European monarchs are famous because of their violence. It's a lot easier to forgive murder when it happened centuries ago.
After the Danes returned to Greeland and first met the Inuit, the priests pushed for religious and cultural assimilation. Not strictly speaking linguistic assimilation, since they were good protestants who believed everyone had a right to hear the gospel in their own language, but it seems likely the language would have disappeared eventually if they got their way.
But the mercantile class in Denmark resisted development efforts, because if the Greenlanders became just another European people under the Danish crown, exploiting trade with them might become less profitable. People who were willing to live without European material comforts, such as they were, yet would sell you highly lucrative trade goods in return for comparatively little. The policy may have saved their language and culture, but at the cost of crippling economic development for a long time.
Maybe it was like that with the frontier/foraging Sami in the past, too. Kept apart in order to be easier to exploit economically. Though already in Harald Fairhair's day, it seems there were also Sami living among the Norse as boatwrights and smiths and maybe also as wandering professional hunters, hunting livestock predators for bounties - we know that kept going for a long time.
Another historian, which I will name - Johan Borgos - has written that the Lofoten islands were roughly 1 / 5 Sami, and that it was priests, the social elite, who first broke the taboo on marrying across the language barrier. Once they had done it, common people started doing it too, and so the language died out in that place. Not really from deliberate suppression effort (that came much later), but simply from "well, our parents speak different languages but most of the people we interact with speak Norwegian, so..."
Segregation can "work wonders" for preserving language and culture, but it's obviously often not a good thing. And to some degree, I think we have to respect our ancestors choices that they wanted bakeries, horn orchestras, cinemas, photography studios, tuberculosis sanatoriums, teetotaller lodges, baptists and salvationists, steam ships, traveling circuses, gymnastic competitions, revue theater etc. etc. in short everything modern, coded as "Norwegian" to them - rather than joik and reindeer and the few exotic things coded as Sami.
hmm, of course current news would rather undermine that theory, but maybe today's exotic foreign countries are about as close as neighboring countries were back in Viking times.
Yearning for Valhalla is more a specific type of extremely online poster / podcast bro / FBI director kind of behavior.
A quote I found here on HN, that I really liked: "Americans will say they are Italian because their great grandma ate spaghetti once, but God forbid someone is American because he was born there" - mvieira38 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43930642)
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.
All sorts of strange things are common on twitter that are completely absent in real life. It shouldn't be used for any measure of reality, especially if you're judging the people of a continent.
People say similar stuff about Serbians in Chicago (how it's the second biggest Serbian city after Belgrade), but usually all of that is overestimated significantly. Just like people overestimate their local city population (most in Belgrade claim it has 2M people when census on a metropolitan area gets us to 1.57M).
These are Swedish communities, as opposed to Sami ones, they've been integrated into the wider Swedish society since their founding, yet these languages are still alive today(though some are critically endangered)
Reminds me of this sketch. [0]
> And Chicago has more Polish that Warsaw, but that’s actual expats and their kids.
This is one of those persistent myths. While Chicago has many Poles and people of Polish ancestry living there, it has never exceeded the population of Warsaw. And New York has more Poles than Chicago.
What I would ask you is why does it irk you, why do you care? Is it some hindance to my culture that I want to learn about it and try to "cosplay"? What would you prefer that we act as though we're here sui generis? Is somebody's culture lesser because they're not in that country at that time?
People of Italian ancestry in the US did not forget everything about their past, in many cultures that transition is even more recent; I remember my immigrant grandmother. Comes off as gatekeeping people who would otherwise be your relatives.
A pox o' chads on your house, ya mewlin' landlubber!
Do you think the LA Rams have that name to claim ancestry?
"They are named after the Vikings of medieval Scandinavia, reflecting the prominent Scandinavian American culture of Minnesota."
The term “dialect” is very fluid, and intelligibility is not a requirement. It is often a negotiated term that has more to do with culture or politics.
In China, they even call Cantonese and Hakka “dialects”, which is linguistically absurd, but serves a political purpose.
And from what I understand Älvdalsmål is, like all dialects, getting rounded at the corners and getting more understandable to other Swedes.
Even dialects that sound incomprehensible at first, if you're a native speaker you'll get used to it quickly. The difficulty of Älvdalska is superficial, it's actually very close to what you're used to, so you'll learn to understand them and they already know how to understand you.
Sami is completely different. It takes a long time to learn. Go back 150 years, and very few Sami would be able to move to the capital and pass as Norwegian or Swedish, their accent would give them away even if they did know the majority language. Go back another 50 years, and they may simply not have been allowed to even try to pass in many places (as I recall, the first Sami priest in Norway, Anders Porsanger, was rejected by his Trondheim congregation. He was simply too weird for them, even though he was highly educated and of course spoke excellent Norwegian).
Nobody has official numbers on populations that are a mix of documented and undocumented people. But I trust members of those groups and their relatives probably have a better estimate, even if it's offset by not having a degree in statistics.
And its not the first time, either. There's been several revivals of the beliefs and culture over the years - for example, we didn't even have the word 'viking' in English until the 18th Century.
It doesn't keep me up at night, but I think it's tacky and vulgar.
Or, to put it another way: your criticism is tacky and vulgar. Perhaps what you're describing is "cosplaying" but that's not how immigrant communities see themselves. I do in fact know the perecentages of my national makeup but pizza and beer aren't how I celebrate that. Nobles know their ancestry down to the smallest detail, is somebody really tacky for knowing that technically they are 1/4th Italian? I don't think attacking somebody's identity is ever fair; it costs you nothing but is everything to them.