Forums

I mean, that I don't see teams for players in the overlay

i.e.  

Is this work around because of some coding limitations? Naively, I would think of normal bridges (the Persian was a particular case) as a structure that behaves like the port and the wall: start on one shore, finish on another (under certain depth/lenght limits), and the construction animation doesn't have to be that accurate (none is)... maybe there's some problem about walking on top of it if done in this way?

I don’t see any relevance in this line of argument. Proto‑Indo‑European dates back to the Neolithic; its origin is probably around 4000 BC, which means it is even further removed from Proto‑Germanic than Proto‑Germanic is from our modern languages. In this situation, we’re comparing things that simply can’t be compared anymore. The purpose of this discussion is to try to understand what vocabulary speakers of Proto‑Germanic might have used to refer to their settlements. The Cimbri migrations took place around 100 BC. I don’t see the point of going back that much further. And if you want to talk about the reconstructed PIE form *ḱóymos, it did indeed yield *haimaz in Proto‑Germanic, but it also produced κώμη (kōmē) in Ancient Greek and káimas in Lithuanian, both of which can be used to refer to a village. Kōmē is precisely the form chosen to designate the first phase (village) for Greek civilizations in the game… So it’s a bit inconsistent to criticize that choice on the grounds that the older PIE form doesn’t necessarily refer to a settlement. That’s really stretching the argument, and I don’t see the point of it. In your message, you criticize me several times for relying on place names that date from a few centuries after the Cimbri period, but in the end, you are constructing an argument based on reconstructions of a language that predates Proto-Germanic by several millennia.  Once again, I don’t understand the point of your message. I never said that Old Norse or Old English was older than the other. I’m simply saying that the source you used (Lehmann) suggests that the word þurpą originally referred to a farm, and that the meaning “village” appeared later. In this discussion, the only reason to use medieval Germanic languages is to understand the semantic evolution of words from Proto‑Germanic onward. The context we’re interested in is Proto‑Germanic. In Old Norse, as in Gothic, the word derived from þurpą seems to have preserved its original meaning, that of a farm or agricultural estate. This supports my initial point: the meaning of þurpą in Proto‑Germanic must have been “farm.”  And there is no doubt that Old Norse preserved the meaning of “farm” or “agricultural estate.” This is very clear in the poems of the Edda, especially in Hávamál and Vafþrúðnismál. In the Danelaw and in the earliest written records from Denmark, we see that þorps refers exclusively to secondary settlements that depend on a larger primary settlement. In those cases, þorps can refer both to hamlets and to isolated farms. We see the same thing in medieval Scandinavian law codes: þorp retains the meaning of “farm” as well as “village.” There is, however, a notable case in medieval Swedish law where þorp still means specifically “farm” in Old Swedish, which seems to have preserved this original meaning even longer.   The evolution of the Germanic languages clearly shows this semantic shift from “farm” to “village.” It’s an understandable shift, since it follows the same pattern as Latin villa, which eventually gave the word “village.” I have taken the time to demonstrate that studies of place names generally indicate that -Heim was used in the oldest layer of place names. Without exception, these studies show that there were several periods characterized by different dynamics in the rules governing the naming of new settlements. It is clear that the trend involving -Dorf emerged relatively late, and this precisely explains what we observe in the various Germanic languages. There was a semantic shift that accompanied the social changes that transformed Germanic societies.

merged