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IANAL[1] but is it possible that "vik" meant "home" or something as long as 20,000 years ago, before people even populated the Americas, and that this word persisted throughout the development of American and North Germanic languages?

[1] linguist :)



Unfortunately for your hypothesis, the etymology of the Norse or Icelandic suffix "-vik" in Reykjavik is known. It means "bay", originally through a sense of a twist or turn, like a turning in along the coast. It is related to English "wend", "wind (up)" or "way". ("Sideways" = "turned to the side".) The same Indo-European root, in a slightly different but related sense (think "turn over") via Latin gives "victor" and "vanquish", and also through Germanic "weaken" (to make yield).


There's essentially no chance of that—any linguistic connection would have happened in the last 2,000 years or so. Spoken language sans written record changes much too fast to preserve such semantics—and, to be clear, I don't think there's any evidence of a morphological feature being preserved that long without becoming mutually unintelligible literally anywhere. Even considering the last 2,000 years you'd have to explain how the language feature hopped over the Sámi (who speak a language much closer to Finnish than Norwegian or Greenlandic) to be established between two cultures with no archaeological or cultural evidence of contact.

Secondly, the semantics of the two suffixes appear to be different, with the Inuit term being a fairly abstract place term, and the Germanic prefix being specifically a geographic location suffix.




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