THE BIG QUESTIONS...

Eiger - FTW!

It works with eigen.

Ah ZV, our resident linguist in his element.

OK I'll concede the word 'Eiger'. I didnt know its origins and thought EV had researched the item.

Of "Vinne' I put out a challenge. Certainly I should not have used the terms 'originated from'. Yes a faux pas. But Vinne is a norse term from the common old germanic which in English translates as 'Win' and in present german as 'gewinnen'. More than likely Vinne and Gewinnen' are the older terms from which the English word originated....which one is the original I believe is conjectual given that both the norse and german invaders during the dark ages would have settled in England. The original source of gewinnen and vinne, both from the old germanic tongue is I guess lost in the past, but they are recognised as being related and meaning the same thing..(Wikipaedia et al)

But that leaves us with a dilemma Eiger. I guess the best we can get away with is 'The Sharpest of the Winners'. Certainly 'The Winning Virgin' would not seem appropriate for our hero.

Aha, now I discern the source of your conceptual difficulties: you have mistaken "England" for "Britain", and "Germans" for "Anglo-Saxons" (a.k.a. "English"). The Germans didn't invade Britain; the English did; and the Norse invaded England some centuries later.

It's true that Old Norse influenced the English language. However, the English already spoke Germanic languages when they arrived in Britain; they didn't need the Norse to introduce it. Thus the Modern English word "win" comes to us from Primitive Germanic *wenwanan by way of Old English winnan (struggle for; work at; strive; fight) and gewinnan (to gain or succeed by struggling; to win). This is why we say 'win' with a bilabial semivowel /w/. If it came to us by way of O.N. vinna, then we would pronounce it with a voice labio-dental fricative /v/, as in Modern Danish vinde.

Modern English win, Modern German gewinnen, and Modern Danish vinde are all cognate words because they are derived from the same P.Gmc root;. They do not represent points on a cline.

In other words: knock it off with the pseudohistory. Next you'll be telling us that the English are a lost tribe of Israel, because "Saxons" is a corruption of "Isaac's sons".

But you're such a tease ZV.

I defer of course to your obvious philological expertise. But I suspect you read things into what I was saying that weren't there. The original residents of the British homelands as I understand it were the Britons, and though they spoke a celtic tongue, they were more closely related to the early pre Visigoth French and Hispanics, than the eastern and northern germanic stock. Certailny they had lived there since shortly prior to the end of the last Ice Age about 12,000 years ago, when the land became again habitable. I also appreciate that the celtic culture was an ancient and dominant northern European culture at the time of the Romans, covering many diverse peoples.

Though the Roman's (and their military allies) may have left their racial markers on the Britons as did the Phoenicians up to 1500 years before (which I guess is where the lost tribe of Israel myth originates), the Briton race was fairly stable. Then of course the Angles, Jutes, Saxons, which are predominently northern European Germanic tribes, 'migrated' in huge numbers, followed by the Danes and Scandanavians either interbreeding with the britons or forcing them back into the extremes of the mainland British Isle. As you well know Hibernia (Northern Scotland), Western Wales, Ireland and Western France are the remaining elements of that culture.

Now I am no philogist, which seems to be one of your callings, but in very general terms I think you'll find the above is historically valid. Further much of the Briton language would have been lost to mainland Britain, but for the extremes of Scotland, Wales (and Ireland). Most of the Anglish tongue originates from the Angles, Jutes, Danes, Saxons, Western Scandanavians and later the French. The first four sets of people are linguistically northern Germanic (not necessarily from Germany). So the relationship between the Norse and German is valid and the word Vinne is a Germanic word meaning 'win' in its present context which is what I was attempting to offer to young EV as a character description. And I think you'll find the term 'Old Englsh' refers to the early Anglo-Saxon tongue from about the 6th-10th century before it was flooded by French vocabulary. That period as you well know was the 'Dark Ages'

Mind you, other than the Finnish and Basque tongues, most Eurpoean languages as I understand it are related anyway. Further most Celtic cultures had no written langauge that we know of, so to seek comparable linguistic sources earlier as confirmation of a words origin is somewhat problematic. Though they were not illiterate and often used other cultures written scripts and languages, their religious caste tended to maintain a strong tabu against writing, preferring the oral traditions, which I suppose was an effort to maintain control of their peoples. Written Scotiish/Irish Celtic script for example did not appear until well into the fourth and ffth centuries, said to be the legacy of St Patrick's influence, especially for writing biblical verses and of course the later dominance of the Irish in Christianity during the dark ages.

Now you're just making stuff up.