Ingvaeonic

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Belonging to or characteristic of an ancient Germanic tribe that inhabited areas around the North Sea and whose language influenced modern English and other Germanic tongues
2. Relating to a prehistoric Germanic group whose cultural and linguistic heritage shaped the development of English and neighboring Germanic languages
3. Of or pertaining to an early Germanic people whose ancestral territory and speech patterns contributed significantly to the formation of modern English

Etymology: The adjective "Ingvaeonic" describes a group of early West Germanic languages and peoples, the ones that include Old English, Old Frisian and Old Saxon. The name began as a Latin label. The Roman writer Tacitus, in his "Germania" of about 98 CE, recorded a group of Germanic tribes he called the "Ingaevones," who lived along the North Sea coast. Modern scholars took that Latin name and gave it a new job, using it as a convenient umbrella term for the Germanic dialects of that coastal region. The Latin form itself appears to rest on a Germanic first element, which may mean "descendant of Yngvi," a name associated with the god better known from Norse sources as Ing or Yngvi-Freyr. Latin then gave the name its own ending, "-ones," and English took the modern adjective by adding the suffix "-ic" to the Latin base, a pattern common in scholarly terms for language groups.