"INGENS!"

Old English ingefolc = 'native race'. Is that in-gefolc or inge-folc? Well, Ing (or hypothetical *Ingwaz) was the taboo name of the Norse fertility god Freyr (which itself means merely 'lord'). 'Ing' means something like 'begetter' or 'begotten' as far as I can tell from its usage in compound words and cognates in various languages-- something to do with reproduction and fertility. But if 'inge-folc' is the proper reading ('gefolc' doesn't make sense, grammatically), it would mean literally 'begotten folk' or 'descendants'-- 'tribe', really, which fits with 'native race'.

It's not inconceivable that ingefolc could become a Middle English 'ingens', with 'g' pronounced like our 'j'. So it would sound like 'injuns', which would be a further 'corruption'. I wonder why North American aboriginal peoples don't call themselves Injuns. I don't sense that it was a derogatory name, but I could be wrong. But if I were of American Indian stock, I would call myself an Injun, apart from my tribal name, of course. And after all, it sounds like a mild corruption of 'indigen', which means 'native race'-- ha! With 'Injun' we avoid the misnomer 'Indian'-- "No, we're not from India!" So, 'Injun' is OK by me.

And about tribes-- 'tribe' is being used very loosely by some people now. But I think a tribe must be essentially 'a long-established group of interbred people', otherwise, it's more like just a subculture or a culture. So, 'tribal'-- it's become a pop-culture term, one of those very vague usages that no one bothers defining; has become, essentially, pop-babble. I've had enough of that air-headed vagueness. Of course, what I do to germanic vocabularies verges on the criminal, so am I one to speak? As far as Anglo-Saxon paganism goes, we have 'theod' (='tribe'), which sounds rather like 'thud'. I suppose one can be 'theodisc' (pronounced '-ish') without actually belonging to a theod back in the Dark Ages ('ish' meaning 'like... sort of'), being looser than 'tribal', which to me, anyway, says 'of a tribe'. Picky! Picky! Picky! Oh well.

By the way, you might have noticed that I don't show how to pronounce my germanic (Eormennish) terminology. I should, in some cases, but the problem is that I'm basically a word-artist, not a linguist, and I spell my word-creations however tastes best at the time; i.e., makes the 'word-magic'. Besides, I'm often hybridizing cognates from different languages, with different systems of pronunciation. And then there's modern English orthography, which is semi-chaotic. So deciding how to pronounce and spell these words is difficult. You should pronounce them however you want, but if you want to know how I would do it, just ask. Usually I go with how you'd spell it in modern English, but sometimes I like the exotic/archaic evocative effect of weird spelling of the original Old Norse or Old English, say.

Again by the way, 'eormen' sounds a bit like 'German', which is a latinate word, not germanic. But that it means 'enormous, great' is why I chose it to name this word-hoard I invent-- as 'Eormanz' (which also means 'romance' in the sense of 'Romantic movement' or 'a medieval romance'-- but not 'l'amour'). The 'z' is a German 'z', pronounced like our 'ts'-- 'yore-mants').