There's the discussion regarding þurpą reconstruction, and there's the later discussion regarding the attested cognates. Regarding the latter, you have been trying to argue that one can see the earliest attested cognates refer to a farmstead, or according to you, a single dwelling, first with OHG, but then I've shown that OE is attested earlier. Concerning that latest discussion, "original meaning" can only refer to the time of the EE glossary. Then, although "the study is mainly concerned with the period from around 850 to 1250", it's not correct to say that "they are not claiming that the word thorp had always denoted such a cluster, nor that several buildings were necessarily part of its original meaning", since I've shown they do claim this when they stated that compitum in the EE must have also been interpreted as a "small rural settlement" (conclusion I arrived at independently, in part considering they would emerge right there) by "unsophisticated people". But you know this, since later you dismiss this evidence by saying that It's not reasonable to suppose that more exploration would have led to the conclusion that "thorp" was actually a single dwelling at the time of the EE glossary, which was your claim. That would be basically the opposite of what they are already claiming, which aligns with the current EE translation (published a few years later), as I've already explained. But maybe focusing on þurpą in what follows will clarify this even further.   Concerning þurpą reconstruction (the other interpretation of "original meaning"), my claim is not exactly that "Proto-Germanic þurpą already referred to a village or hamlet", that's semantically charged, but that þurpą probably didn't restrict itself to a single farmstead. Then I guess you could call this collection of farmsteads a settlement, a hamlet, or small village, but none of that is my original claim (just approximate terms to emphasise a contraposition with your single dwelling claim). My claim is based on that (new relevant information is added in the last point): -The Germanic cognates you tried to use to further your claim actually support mine, as demonstrated from your sources. The rare unique instance in Gothic cannot be reliably used, and could have treated a collection of farmsteads as "farmland", like Ekwall seems to do. -The Celtic cognates also refer to a settlement larger than a single farmstead, further reinforcing the view that, if that was the actual meaning in Gothic, it was indeed the exception. This is way more parsimonious than thinking that the "earliest meaning was closer to the one preserved in Gothic" and everything else changed. -The Proto-Germanic reconstruction is often associated with "crowd" and "settlement". While you pointed out that the latter is ambiguous, Kroonen's student states, when questioning if Latin trabs is also a cognate, that "while all the other comparanda refer to dwellings, settlements, and communities, Lat. trabs sometimes refers to part of a building". Through his thesis he consistently uses the word "settlement" to describe multiple dwellings, and small "communities" is exactly what I've been talking about (conclusion I arrived at independently, in part considering the association with "crowd"). Notice how, even when listing in the previous page that in Gothic it meant "farmland", absolutely nothing is said about that for Proto-Germanic.   Regarding the quotes from the book towards the end, I know them, they either align with my claim or don't go against it, and certainly don't support a single dwelling interpretation. Many specific characteristics regarding thorps is why I said to bear in mind they "don't necessarily apply to þurpą, being a cognate many centuries after the fact". The relevant claims in question are the ones I just restated in this post.

I found this study fascinating. It is exactly the kind of research I enjoy, much like the studies of German and Swiss place names that I mentioned earlier. However, there is a reason why I have not placed too much weight on it in this discussion: the study is mainly concerned with the period from around 850 to 1250. The authors state this chronological focus several times. They examine that period because it was then that thorp and throp became highly productive in place names, during a major transformation of agriculture and rural settlement. But that is not the central issue in our debate. We are trying to determine what these words may have meant much earlier, before the medieval period. Your claim is that Proto-Germanic þurpą already referred to a village or hamlet. That is what I am disputing. I challenged this interpretation using the Gothic evidence for two reasons. First, þaurp is never used to translate "village" in the Gothic Bible, despite the fact that villages are mentioned repeatedly. Second, its only occurrence refers to a field or agricultural estate. Gothic is the only Germanic language for which we have substantial evidence from before the medieval period. You responded that Gothic may have undergone its own semantic innovation and lost an earlier village sense, while other Germanic languages later used cognates of þurpą for villages. I do not deny the medieval evidence. At some point, these words clearly did come to designate villages. What I dispute is the assumption that this was their original meaning. My hypothesis is that the earliest meaning was closer to the one preserved in Gothic, and that the village sense developed during the later reorganisation of the agricultural landscape, when forms such as thorp and dorf became especially productive in place names. I am restating this because our discussion seems to be drifting further into the Middle Ages, while the disputed question concerns a much earlier semantic stage. The excerpt you quoted must also be understood within the chronological limits of the study. It comes from an archaeological analysis centered on the period from approximately 850 to 1250. When the authors refer to the "earliest phases" of thorps, they mean the earliest phases of the medieval settlement phenomenon they are reconstructing, the "thorp moment". To make this more explicit and clearer, I recommend looking at figure 7.3 on page 150 that I posted below. They are not making a statement about the original Proto-Germanic meaning of the word. "In their earliest phases" refers to the earliest archaeologically recoverable phases of the thorp settlements examined in the study. It does not refer to the earliest history of the word in Old English or the Germanic languages. The compact and linear organisation described in the passage characterises the period when many thorps had become small villages or nucleated settlements. It cannot simply be projected backwards to prove that thorps had always denoted a settlement composed of several households. The authors themselves do not claim that thorps appeared suddenly as fully formed villages. They consider the possible regrouping of earlier farmsteads and leave aspects of the preceding nucleation process unresolved. Their medieval reconstruction therefore cannot be treated as evidence that "village" or "hamlet" was already the word’s original meaning centuries earlier. This is notably what they are discussing at the pages 148, 149 and 150 of their book. The passage actually describes a three-stage model: dispersed farmsteads, followed by small clusters of farmsteads, and only later by fully nucleated villages. The authors begin from an "archaeologically attested pre-open-field landscape of dispersed farmsteads" and question the conventional assumption that "full dispersion gave way to full nucleation" without any intermediate stage. Their alternative is explicit: "Might a first stage towards full nucleation not have been the grouping of individual farmsteads into a number of small hamlet clusters?" In this model, thorps are precisely that intermediate stage. They are not necessarily settlements inserted into a landscape that had already been reorganised. Instead, the authors ask whether they "played [a role] in that reorganisation itself". A thorp could therefore emerge when previously dispersed farmsteads were brought together into a small secondary cluster associated with the laying out of new fields. This helps clarify what the authors mean elsewhere when they describe the "earliest phases" of thorps as compact settlements with several building plots. They are describing the earliest archaeologically recognisable phase of the thorp moment, after individual farmsteads had begun to be grouped together. They are not claiming that the word thorp had always denoted such a cluster, nor that several buildings were necessarily part of its original meaning. The authors are also careful to call the resulting settlement "a secondary or subsidiary or outlying hamlet," rather than a primary village. Their model is therefore not simply "thorp means village". It is a historical process: Dispersed farmsteads → Small subsidiary clusters → Fuller village nucleation. This passage consequently supports the idea that the characteristic medieval thorp could have resulted from the reorganisation of earlier individual farms. It does not allow the later clustered form to be projected backwards as the original and permanent meaning of the word. It is truly a new meaning that is emerging along with a new phenomenon. This distinction is especially important because the authors themselves question whether the known English throp-names really belong to the earliest Anglo-Saxon centuries. They write that "it is not as clear to us as it was to Smith that the known place-names in þrop date from the earliest centuries of Anglo-Saxon settlement," and they describe Smith’s proposed pre-eighth-century chronology as "coherent, but […] far from conclusive." They also observe that þrop-names "tend to be recorded late" and lack the archaic or obscure first elements found in name-types believed to belong to the earlier Anglo-Saxon period. They propose that thorps and throps played a part in the agricultural transformations of approximately 850 to 1250, involving open-field farming and increasing settlement nucleation. The "thorp moment" is presented as an "intermediary stage of nucleation". The compact plans and multiple plots described in the disputed passage belong to that medieval process, not necessarily to the original lexical history of the word. We cannot say that the definition of thorp between 850 and 1250 was the same much earlier. On the contrary, the authors dispute the existence of thorps before the 9th century. Therefore, you are misrepresenting their argument by twisting their conclusion to project it onto a different chronological period. Furthermore, the example of a compact cluster of farmsteads should not be treated as the only possible model. It is mostly an ideal case. Elsewhere in the study, the authors discuss places called thorps that were represented by individual farmsteads or dependent agricultural holdings. This is why I think their use of the broad term settlement should be understood flexibly: it does not, by itself, specify a minimum number of houses, farms or households. A few quotes from their book and their article I find appropriate to highlight the previous points: "We therefore reject as unlikely earlier attempts to differentiate sharply the throps of English England [...] from the thorps of the Danelaw, and we suspect that both are likely to denote much the same sorts of settlement on the ground, established during a single phase [...] of settlement development." "Thorps were born out of these transformations of farming practices and settlement patterns from the late ninth century onwards. But thorps, both as places and as communities, were not simply witnesses to these changes in the landscape: rather, they were active participants in them." "The general implications of all these statistics are clear: thorps are much more likely to appear – if they survive at all – as small settlements or single farms than as parishes or villages" "Subtle differences were also noted in their meanings. OE throp was noted in early documents as glossing terms such as tun, compitum (a cross-roads), fundus (estate) and villa (farm), and in one instance thing-stow (a place of assembly). Given these alternatives, early scholars proposed its translation as 'village' or 'hamlet', though medieval usage suggests that in names of late origin it was generally used of some smaller form of settlement." "The word appears in five Anglo-Saxon glossaries, although four of them ultimately derive the relevant item from a single source, which rather reduces the witness-count. The exception appears the most straightforward instance. A list copied in the first half of the eleventh century contains the gloss ‘fundus, þrop’, where fundus is a term defined by Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary as ‘a piece of land, a farm, estate’. This clearly sits within the range of senses we might expect for throp/thorp. The other group of glosses seems more challenging. Here throp appears in association with Lat compitum, which primarily means ‘cross-roads’. In one instance it is additionally combined with OE thing-stow ‘meeting-place’. These senses are rather different from what is generally suggested by Germanic cognates and later English evidence, but they have been admitted into the dictionary definitions of throp, have been sought in some place-names and have coloured discussions of the Germanic term’s ultimate etymology." "What European studies have shown is that thorps tend to be small, often dependent, low-status and outlying places. This is true across their whole distribution. Beyond this, however, they appear to share little in common. It has been suggested, for example, that thorps in Denmark have their origins in a period of settlement expansion and landscape colonisation beginning in the last quarter of the tenth century and concluding before 1100." "Additional early senses were offered. Gothic thaurp ‘a field’ was identified as a cognate, while Primitive Germanic *thurpa- was associated with Latin turba ‘a tumult, a mob, a crowd’. The latter was linked to a meaning ‘village’, and supported by the fact that in Old High German the term dorf could mean ‘a gathering of people’. Smith identified Germany as the early centre of a place-name element already well established by the fifth and sixth centuries. From here it spread into southern Denmark, where it had become common by the Viking period. It continued its northerly advance into Sweden, and ultimately, but in a more limited way, to Norway and Iceland. Smith argued that it entered England with an early wave of Anglo-Saxon settlers coming from the Germanic homelands." "There is general agreement that the þorps of the Danelaw were originally diminutive in size and dependent on a larger settlement nearby: A. H. Smith defined the term as ‘a secondary settlement, a dependent outlying farmstead or hamlet’, observing that this is closely equivalent to the sense of þorp in early Denmark (Smith 1956, II: 205–209). Later commentators have been happy broadly to agree. And scholars have also recognised that there were good reasons to interpret the þrop names outside the Danelaw in much the same way: Smith glossed this element as ‘a hamlet, an outlying farm’, and indicated in his discussion that there were clear signs of dependency here as well (ibid.: 214–215)." "Such an account implies that the distribution of the þrops may be governed by factors other than the circumstances of the earliest Anglo-Saxon settlements, and it is clear that Fellows-Jensen had serious doubts about Smith’s chronology. She went on to note that the þrops are often rather late-recorded, later than the Danelaw þorps, suggesting that the English names ‘may be younger as a class’; she has even floated the idea that some of the þrop-names may have arisen under the influence of Danish þorp as a loan-word (Fellows-Jensen 2003: 49)." "There seem to us also good reasons to doubt Smith’s chronology. Þrop-names do tend to be recorded late, even though – as Fellows-Jensen observed – they are found in areas where early documentation is relatively abundant. Þrop is not combined with the sort of archaic or obscure first elements that characterise place-names containing other elements, like hām ‘homestead’, believed to belong to the earlier Anglo-Saxon centuries. And we, like Fellows-Jensen, are struck by that continuous, coherent looking, geographical distribution, and the great apparent similarity in usage between þorps and þrops either side of the Danelaw line. It may be possible that the settlements named in this way were created on similar lines centuries apart." Isidore of Seville writings are from the 6th century. The Épinal-Erfurt Glossary is from the 7th century. So once again, this is a chronological period much earlier than that observed archaeologically by the authors of the book we have just discussed. The authors do not address glosses directly in their study but in an appendix, and they express legitimate doubts. However, a large part of their criticism is directed at the concept of a crossroads associated with the word conpetum. Personally, I agree with them and I absolutely do not support this interpretation, which derives more from classical Latin than from the Middle Ages. Isidore of Seville, on the other hand, emphasizes the agricultural nature by saying it is a gathering of peasants. I really think it's important to gather all the early elements related to the cognates of þurpą. We see that the word thorp can be associated with the notion of gathering, both with its comparison to concetum and thing-stow, but also by looking at other cognates in German and Old Norse that can also be used in a context of gathering. This is why I said that 'þrop' referred to an estate acting also as a gathering place for peasants who collectively managed land, and that there was a semantic shift in its meaning to refer first to the entire community and then to a village. In my opinion, the comparison with tuun is more logical in this sense because this word has also undergone a similar semantic shift, with the notion of a physically delimited space to then designate the notion of property, of domain and then the buildings which are contained in the domain. I agree with the authors when they say that these are "settlements" but I insist that this could derive from a semantic shift, first starting with the idea of bringing together peasants initially, then bringing together farms and agricultural holdings in a second stage. The authors closed the debate too quickly by assuming that "tuun" must refer to a settlement and that, therefore, "throp" necessarily referred to the same thing even then. I think they should have explored this question more deeply than it might seem, beyond a simple appendix, as I believe it would have lent even more weight to their concept of community-based agricultural land management. Looking at the problem from the perspective of a delimited space dedicated to agriculture can help to unify the different definitions given in the different glossaries. I will respond to the rest of the arguments in due course. I want to respond properly to your arguments.

https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/17728/1/2011beattiemphil.pdf.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com   I asked chat gpt for more sources that could give me Middle Eastern clothing. The AI gave me that source above.   He gave me advice that I already knew from my experience: look at the helmets of neighboring civs and observe their clothing.

It will be available on Linux and Mac OS.On Windows too, obviously.  

@Genava55 your first post is clear and I agree with most of it, except what you seem to actually stand for, which seems confirmed in your second post. Yes, "settlement" can be ambiguous, but many times it's clear what's being said from context, or even explicitly explained. When that book says "small settlements", it's clear that they refer to a few dwellings and not to the size of a single one. You argue against thorps usually "being more than a single farmstead" by referring to my quote as an "isolated example", but use a couple of isolated examples to say there's no "sufficient basis for attributing to the authors a conclusion they do not themselves formulate", when they actually conclude: Which has been my point all along.   I wouldn't say an "unambiguous synonym for 'village'" is intended to be attached by current sources. As I've said many times, this association doesn't have to refer to a full-blown village, that might well be an exaggeration, it's just a matter of resemblance. When "hamlet or village" is used, what is meant is that there are multiple dwellings (or farmsteads, if you will), and not just a single one, and after all, all this kind of started when you said: Even when that might be an exaggeration and "hamlet is a very few dwellings" should be put in-between. The central issue is clear and I've mentioned it many times: are we dealing with a single farmstead or a group of them? I think it's clear most of the current evidence points to the group, and why it's no big issue that the current EE translation uses "hamlet or village", not in the spirit of saying thorps were proper villages, but that they were "small settlements" made up from a "collection of dwellings". Maybe Ekwall (who, again, died over 60 years ago) wanted to call all that just "farm", possibly "hamlet", but not "village", but taking that old sentence literally is misleading, considering what the current evidence tries to imply.   And still, all that is only half of the argument. You still have not commented on Celtic cognates of haimaz having no relation with any kind of settlement, while þurpą cognates are consistently more settlement-like, showing it's doubtful to think haimaz mainly referred to some kind of settlement early on, while þurpą likely did. I still think you got too focused on Gothic and later (we are still talking about OE thorps after all) instead of the bigger picture provided by both branches and explaining why the accepted reconstructions are what they are.