"Reciept for antibiotics" -- sometimes I make really English Swedish ridiculous mistakes in English, but it's easy with receipt kvitto 'false friends' like this. This has of course prescription recept nothing to do with ferrets, but this very brief wrist ankel language lession can be used to show that when my ankle vrist ancestors conquered the British Isles a millenium FERRET ILLER ago, they did not bring any ferrets. (Just like you swine svin can show they knew about glass, but didn't use it dog,hound hund for windows.) cat katt glass glas This certainly means the Vikings never had ferrets, window f[oe]nster and if they brought any home from the places wolf varg,ulv they visited, they weren't successful up north. elk [ae]lg I'll try to find out the earliest mention of ferrets rat r[ao]tta in Sweden. weasel vessla bird,fowl f[ao]gel (I also take the occasion to apologize for my fish fisk sometimes incorrect use of terms, we've chosen to house hus use the same terms for ferrets as for dogs, so pen penna "puppie", "bitch", "bark" is exactly what I think in knife kniv Swedish, and then mistakenly translate...) ship skepp -- Urban Fredriksson [log in to unmask] [Someone accidentally sent me email in Swedish intended for someone else. Surprised the heck out of them when I managed to translate it because many of the words were sorta similar to English or other languages I have some (vague) familiarity with. But I must remember wrist<=>ankel and ankle<=>vrist ;-) Actually, the Vikings didn't conquer the British Isles a millenia ago. The French (Normans) did. The Vikings were just one of several groups of invaders from about 100AD thru 800AD. And not the most successful either - the Saxons (Germanic) had a longer lasting effect - at least in the south. I would presume that Viking exposure to ferrets would date back to about those days in central Europe and (what is now) Russia. "Ferret" is listed as Middle English (~1150-1400AD) possibly derived from an Old French (<1400AD) word. Probably in turn derived from the Latin "Furo"... Just read a very interesting book about an emmisary from an Egyptian King (!) visiting "Russ" in the company of Vikings around 300AD. The book's interest was that some early Viking mythology *might* indicate that they had contact with the last remnants of Neanderthal man, and this Egyptian's account seems to verify it. Fascinating...] [Posted in FML issue 0392]