Genava55

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.

One has to bear in mind that certain thorp characteristics don't necessarily apply to þurpą, being a cognate many centuries after the fact. All this focuses only on supporting the EE translation being a small settlement. I do not think that an isolated example, removed from its immediate context, provides a sufficient basis for attributing to the authors a conclusion they do not themselves formulate. Other passages in the book show that their use of thorp does not necessarily presuppose a settlement composed of several houses or farms. A particularly relevant example occurs in their discussion of minor place-names in Leicestershire, where they observe that "at least one was a farmstead in the thirteenth century". The reference is to Thorp on le Toftis, identified in a source from 1278 as "a lost farmstead described in 1278 as a tillage". This demonstrates that, within the authors' own analysis, a place called a thorp could correspond to a farmstead or agricultural holding. It does not establish that every thorp had this form, but it does rule out the claim that the term necessarily referred to a group of several houses or farms. Upthrop provides a comparable example. The authors treat this throp as a distinct unit in a landscape containing several dispersed settlements. Drawing on the charter of 869, they describe it as a 'little estate' incorporated into a larger estate complex. That description is entirely compatible with a small dependent agricultural establishment and does not, by itself, imply a village composed of several households. This is consistent with their wider discussion of dependency. Some thorps recorded in the Domesday Book were classified as berewicks, meaning outlying farms or estates attached to larger centres. In another document, the dependent estates or appendices of Peterborough were translated as "þa þorpes". The category could therefore encompass subordinate agricultural or estate units, rather than only nucleated communities. The same caution applies to the linguistic evidence. The surviving record of the Old English word is extremely limited, and the authors explicitly acknowledge how little is known about its early form and usage. Nothing in their analysis establishes that thorp originally had to designate a settlement containing several households. Consequently, the possibility that it could initially refer to a single farm, agricultural establishment, estate unit, or even a building at the centre of such a holding is not excluded. The last possibility is not directly demonstrated by the evidence, but neither is it contradicted by the authors' argument. It is also important not to confuse the possible original meaning of the word with the particular historical form adopted by many medieval thorps. The authors' main concern is not the meaning of thorp at the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon period. Their analysis focuses primarily on the profound reorganisation of settlement and agriculture from the ninth century onwards, especially the spread of open-field farming and the movement from dispersed occupation towards more nucleated forms. This is the context of the 'thorp moment'. The term describes an intermediate stage in the reorganisation of the medieval countryside, when small dependent units or satellite settlements helped bridge the gap between earlier dispersed farmsteads and later, more concentrated village territories. As the article puts it, 'Þorps and þrops represent an intermediate stage in the nucleation process, as farming communities sought the best way to run new field systems from the developing centres of population.' The regular and sometimes nucleated layouts identified by the authors therefore belong to this medieval process of transformation. They do not prove that thorp had always meant 'hamlet' or 'village', still less that this was its only possible meaning in early Old English. A term that may originally have designated a farm, estate unit or agricultural establishment could later have been applied more specifically to the small dependent settlements created or reorganised during the thorp moment. Projecting that later medieval morphology backwards would turn the authors' historical hypothesis into a timeless lexical definition that they themselves never formulate.

I have never tried to conceal the fact that the authors use the word settlement. On the contrary, I provided the reference openly. Furthermore, in case you hadn't noticed, Ekwall also uses the term 'settlement' while associating it with the word 'farm'. The disagreement is not about the presence of that word, but about what this very broad term means in this particular context and what conclusions can legitimately be drawn from it. The Cambridge Dictionary, for example, defines settlement simply as "a place where people come to live or the process of settling in such a place". Nothing in that definition necessarily requires several independent households, a cluster of houses, or anything resembling a village. A large isolated farm or estate can therefore constitute a settlement in its own right, even if it contains only one principal residential building. It may also include barns, stables and other agricultural structures, but those additional buildings are not what makes it a settlement. The essential point is that it is a distinct place where people have established themselves and live. This distinction matters because you repeatedly treat settlement as though it necessarily implied a collective residential community larger than a farmstead. It does not. A farmstead, an agricultural estate, a dependent holding, a hamlet and a village can all be described as settlements. The word itself does not tell us how many households were present, whether the buildings were nucleated or dispersed, or whether the site constituted an independent community. I fully understand that the word can be confusing, since I myself have made this mistake in the past, especially because English is not my native language. However, in research, this word refers to a concept distinct from the concept of the number of buildings. As P. J. Duffy notes in the "Historical Geographies, Rural" entry of the International Encyclopedia of Geography, "Historic rural settlement patterns occur in many different forms, from single dispersed farmsteads, through a range of agglomerations of simple farm clusters and hamlets to much more complex nucleations around greens, churches, or castles." If I may give two examples of academic researches along these lines: https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/faculties/faculty-of-humanities/departments/department-of-history/institutes/ancient-history/research/lycia-project/research-areas/tower-and-isolated-farmsteads/ & https://architectus.pwr.edu.pl/files/numery/75_05.pdf In the book (Thorps in a Changing Landscape), I understand settlement primarily in the sense of a newly established farmstead, agricultural estate or dependent rural holding, rather than as an unambiguous synonym for 'village'. This reading is not arbitrary. From the beginning, the authors emphasize the agricultural context of the word and repeatedly connect thorps with farms, estates, cultivated land, soil types and changes in agricultural organization. Their study is not simply an attempt to prove that thorp meant 'village'. It investigates what distinguished these particular rural establishments from places bearing other habitative name elements. The authors explicitly challenge the standard explanation that thorps were merely small villages attached to more important places. Their argument is that this conventional label does not adequately explain what made these places distinctive. They instead examine their subsidiary status, their relationship with older centres, their position in the landscape and their role in the reorganization of arable farming. In other words, their principal concern is not whether a thorp had crossed some demographic threshold separating a farm from a hamlet or a village. Their concern is the specific economic, territorial and agricultural function that justified the use of the name. Their archaeological evidence admittedly shows that some thorps eventually developed into nucleated settlements with several holdings, regular plots or dependent tenants. I have never denied that. But this does not establish that 'village' was the original lexical meaning of the word. It shows what some places bearing that name became during a period of major agricultural and social reorganization. That chronological distinction is essential. A newly founded farmstead or dependent agricultural establishment can attract additional households and gradually become a hamlet or village while retaining its original name. Place names regularly survive major transformations in the size, structure and function of the places they designate. The fact that a medieval or modern thorp was later a village does not prove that the name originally denoted a village when it was coined. Indeed, the authors note that thorp and throp names can point today to villages, hamlets or individual farms. That diversity is exactly what we would expect if the term had been applied to a type of rural establishment whose later development varied from one site to another. Some remained farms, some disappeared, and some developed into larger and more nucleated communities. The later outcomes cannot simply be projected backwards and turned into the original definition. It is also important that the authors situate the creation of these names within changes in agricultural organization and the process of village nucleation. That wording implies a historical development, not an original equivalence between thorp and 'village'. If thorps participated in or contributed to a process of nucleation, it does not follow that they were already fully developed nucleated villages at the beginning of that process. Nor do the authors simply reproduce the conventional model of thorps as dependent hamlets. They explicitly ask us to move beyond that characterization and investigate the particular features that made them distinctive. The book even states that, rather than dismissing them as 'secondary settlements' or dependent hamlets, we should examine their specific characteristics and their role in transforming farming practices. This is much closer to a functional and agricultural interpretation than to your claim that the authors straightforwardly support 'village' as the original meaning. I am therefore not arguing that settlement can only mean 'farmstead', nor am I claiming that every historical thorp consisted of one household. My argument is that settlement is far too broad to substantiate your interpretation. If thorp is glossed as settlement, that remains compatible with a farmstead, an agricultural estate, a dependent rural establishment, a hamlet or a village. The word 'settlement' alone cannot tell us which of these was the original referent. The authors' overall position appears considerably more nuanced than the one you attribute to them. They treat thorps as relatively small rural establishments, often new or subsidiary, closely connected with cultivated land and the reorganization of arable agriculture. Some developed into compact communities with several holdings, while others remained individual farms or disappeared. Their later, broader use as a designation for small rural settlements should not automatically be projected back onto the earlier stages. In short, both the book and the article do not establish that thorp originally meant 'village'. They suggest that thorps were distinctive rural establishments whose agricultural role, dependent status and development contributed to the long process by which parts of the English countryside became more nucleated. The village is therefore better understood as one possible outcome of that development, not as the only meaning already contained in the word from the beginning. The use of settlement consequently does not contradict my interpretation. It encompasses it. If you want to demonstrate that the term originally referred specifically to a collective settlement composed of several independent households, rather than to a farmstead, estate or dependent agricultural establishment that could later develop into such a community, you need evidence beyond the English word settlement. The source you cite does not, by itself, establish that conclusion. This also offers a different explanation for the earlier association of thorp with tuun. The two words did not need to be exact synonyms. Glossaries frequently group words because their referents overlap, not because their meanings are identical. A tuun could be an enclosed holding, and a thorp could be a rural establishment occupying such a holding. Their equivalence in one gloss may therefore reflect a shared physical or functional feature rather than a shared meaning of 'village'. I nevertheless think that the equivalences found in these glossaries follow a coherent semantic logic, as the authors themselves suggest. In my view, the association between competum, tuun, thorp and þingstow may rest on the shared notion of a physically delimited rural area, used for cultivation, habitation, landholding or local assembly. These words need not have been exact synonyms. They may simply have described different aspects or functions of the same kind of agricultural site. I hope this lengthy explanation helps you better understand my position and my perception of the literature on the topic. Personally, this kind of discussion is precisely the heart of my argument. The study of the meaning of words goes beyond simple etymological reconstruction. In my view, the book and the article effectively emphasize the importance of reframing the evolution of the word 'thorp' within the historical context of the Middle Ages and the many changes that transformed the agricultural world. As Stefan Brink says in the quote I've already shared: "The medieval element torp, however, must be seen in a context of the huge colonisation in northern Europe during the high Middle Ages, within a new ‘feudal’ agrarian system with a ‘manor’ and dependent tenant farms within an estate. In Germany these tenant farms often had the name dorf (< þorp), and the word for such a dependent farm was spread with the new colonising strategy to Scandinavia. Early on, the element torp must have developed into a meaning of secondary farm, a farm detached from a hamlet etc., hence not always denoting a tenant farm within an estate."

I have no reason to acknowledge any error in this case. It is an established fact that the Épinal-Erfurt glossary mentions the word 'tuun' in only two contexts, and that its only direct translation in this glossary is the Latin 'cors'. There is no explicit link in this glossary between the word 'tuun' and the concept of a village. There is, therefore, no reason to assume that 'conpetum' denoted a village solely based on the glossary. The dictionary I am criticizing (Murray’s New English Dictionary) uses the Épinal-Erfurt glossary to claim that both 'thorp' and 'tuun' meant 'village,' with the dictionary using one term to explain the other. I demonstrated this by examining both entries and tracing them back to their earliest sources, which refer to one another, a clear case of circular reasoning. They could have employed other arguments, but they did not. Consequently, my critique of this academic source is legitimate. If anyone wishes to argue that 'thorp' or 'conpetum' meant something along the lines of 'village' during that period, they must absolutely support that claim with an argument based on a body of evidence. The same criticism applies to the online edition of the Épinal-Erfurt Glossary that you're using. It offers a translation, but there's no explanation or justification. It's just a raw proposal. Once again, based solely on the glossary, it is difficult to argue that 'conpetum' and 'thorp' referred to a village. I am simply bringing this issue to light and offering an alternative interpretation that is entirely consistent with the primary sources (see below). I think you are misunderstanding what I meant by an appeal to authority. My objection is not that you cite academic sources. I have cited academic literature myself throughout this discussion, and I fully recognize its importance. The problem is that you repeatedly cite their conclusions as if the authority of the source were enough to end the discussion, without explaining how those conclusions were reached or addressing the criticism being made against them. Once again, I want to emphasize this point. What is starting to frustrate me is not the fact that you cite academic sources. What I object to is the way you repeatedly present the conclusion of a dictionary or a scholarly work as if its authority were enough to settle the question, without examining the evidence or explaining the reasoning behind that conclusion. This is what I meant by an appeal to authority. I was not suggesting that citing specialists is inherently illegitimate. The problem arises when the citation is used as a substitute for an argument. Saying that a dictionary reconstructs 'þurpą' as 'village' establishes that this is an accepted interpretation, but it does not demonstrate why that interpretation is correct, nor does it answer a criticism of the evidence on which it may be based. That distinction is particularly important here because the interpretation of the sources is precisely what we are debating. If the reconstructed meaning 'village' was inferred partly from later West and North Germanic evidence, it cannot simply be projected back onto earlier or ambiguous attestations and then used to validate the original reconstruction. That creates a real risk of circular reasoning. The conclusion is treated as a premise, and the evidence is then interpreted through the conclusion it is supposed to establish. The same applies when an editor translates an ambiguous gloss as 'village' or 'hamlet'. That translation is relevant and deserves to be considered, but it remains an interpretation of the primary evidence. It does not make alternative readings illegitimate, especially when the words involved have broad semantic ranges and when other early attestations point toward agricultural land, estates, farms or dependent settlements. What I find unhelpful is the repeated attempt to short-circuit this discussion by answering a criticism of the sources with the authority of the very sources being criticized. Academic works are not beyond examination. Their conclusions can be questioned by looking at their premises, their choice of evidence and the semantic assumptions behind their translations. That is not a rejection of scholarship. It is how scholarship is supposed to be discussed. If you want to defend the interpretation 'village', then explain why the primary evidence supports it better than the alternatives. Show why the Gothic evidence should be considered innovative, why the agricultural and estate-related meanings should be secondary, and why the later collective meanings represent inheritance rather than parallel development or semantic expansion. Simply repeating that a dictionary or an editor adopts that interpretation does not answer those questions. I am perfectly willing to engage with academic sources, including sources that contradict my position. What I do not accept is the suggestion that questioning their reasoning is somehow illegitimate, or that citing their conclusion is enough to close the debate The source I am referring to is a primary source. The Harley Glossary is an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon manuscript (British Library MS Harley 3376) that pairs Latin headwords with Latin and Old English explanations. ‘competum .i. uilla, uel þingstow, uel þrop’ (from The Harley Latin-Old English Glossary published by Robert T. Oliphant) Here 'competum' is translated by 'villa' (farm, estate), 'þingstōw' (place of assembly) and by 'þrop' (or 'thorp')... I'm just pointing this out to show you that even several centuries later, 'conpetum' wasn't translated as 'town' or 'village'. It is translated as a place of assembly, a farm or an estate, and 'thorp'. This supports my point regarding the Épinal-Erfurt glossary: the equivalence between 'thorp' and 'tuun' might instead stem from the concept of an enclosure or courtyard. Which once again is supported by the explanation made by Isidore of Seville: Original: Conpita sunt ubi usus est conventus fieri rusticorum; et dicta conpita quod loca multa in agris eodem conpetant; et quo convenitur a rusticis. Translation: Conpita are the places where farmers usually gather; they are called conpita because many country roads converge there (conpetant) and because that is where the farmers meet. So here I am presenting an argument based on several sources simply to show that there may be another very credible and legitimate interpretation. And the idea of challenging the conventional dictionary interpretation, that 'thorp' did not originally refer to a village but rather to a farm or an agricultural estate, is a view supported by other researchers. For example, while you cited Ekwall for 'tuun', he himself wrote the following regarding 'thorp': OE þorp, þrop is a rare word, and its meaning is doubtful. It was certainly used in the sense ‘farm’, possibly in the sense ‘hamlet’. There is no reason to suppose that it meant ‘village’. [...] The original meaning of þorp was ‘newly reclaimed land, new settlement’. It should not be rendered by ‘village’, but rather by ‘farm’.

As always, you don't understand my point. I'm not criticizing the primary source, but rather the fact that you're mindlessly parroting the opinion expressed in a few dictionaries without realizing that there's an obvious circular reasoning behind the argument. An appeal to authority is a form of reasoning that asserts that an argument is true solely because an influential or reputable person says so. As I've shown you, there are plenty of other researchers, articles, and academic works that don't share your opinion. I don't care if this or that researcher said this or that, what interests me is understanding what their arguments are and what reasoning lies behind them. Again this appeal to authority without any critical thinking... Old English (OE) was a spoken language from the 5th to the 12th century. Obviously, a dictionary of Old English will include all the uses and definitions of a word for the entire period covered by that language. That does not mean that all the definitions existed at the same time from the very beginning of the language. I can't believe I have to explain this. Why did you specifically choose to quote this passage from the article? How is it relevant? Why did you deliberately ignore the rest of the excerpt, which explains that this is a lexical shift? As always, I am astounded by the bad faith you’re displaying. It is dishonest to have deliberately truncated the full excerpt attributed to Ekwall. Here is the complete quote from the article: "The meanings 'homestead' and 'village' must have arisen at an early date as shown among other things by the numerous names in -tūn, even -ingatum found in Normandy and the Boulogne district and apparently due to early Saxon colonization in the district. Saxons are mentioned here by Gregory of Tours in the 6th century. Saxons became "permanent settlers" in northern and western Gaul" It is immediately apparent that the meaning is not the same. This reflects both the semantic shift toward the meanings of "homestead" and "village", which, according to Ekwall, emerged early on without distinguishing between the two. This is evident in the rest of the article following the quote, as all the examples of place names given are ambiguous; they could refer to a farm, an estate, or a hamlet. This uncertainty still exists in current dictionaries, such as The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names (2004), where the difficulty of interpreting one definition or another based on place names is clearly explained: "tūn OE ‘enclosure, garden, field, yard; farm, manor; homestead dwelling, house mansion; group of houses, village, town’. Cognate with OFris, OSax, ON tūn, OHG zūn, G Zaun ‘fence’, OIr dūn ‘fort’, Gaulish dūnon in place-names in -dunum, and OE tӯnan ‘hedge in, fence, enclose, shut’ < *tūn-j-an from Gmc *tūna- ‘fence’. From this basic sense in English developed the meaning ‘place fenced in’ and in place-names the senses ‘enclosure, farmstead, estate and village’ are all in question. Because of this uncertainty in this dictionary the translation is frequently the non-committal ‘settlement’ or ‘farm or village’. Although tūn is already found as a place-name forming element before 730 its period of greatest frequency is in the centuries thereafter. Its main use seems, in fact, to coincide with the period of the break-up of large unitary estates due to land-grants made out of them by kings, noblemen and bishops to individuals of the thegnal class. It is these individuals, it is thought, whose personal names are so often compounded with tūn in the names of English villages, implying manorial overlordship rather than founding fathership and tillage of the soil. It is for this reason that names such as KIRTLINGTON or KNAYTON are normally translated ‘the estate called after Cyrtel(a)’ and ‘Cengifu’s estate’ respectively. PNE ii.188–98, Signposts 177–85, Kluge-Seebold 806." Your document contains the following statement: "With the exception of Britain and southern Upper Germany, the roadside settlement was the commonest-occurring type of small town in the northern frontier provinces." So, in the British context, this does not seem to apply. Furthermore, your document makes no mention whatsoever of any connection to the word "competum". You’re simply assuming that because towns sprang up near crossroads, this necessarily means that the word "competum" once meant "village". That’s a stretch, and I don’t find it convincing. Please address my second point regarding the glossary that equates competum with villa (farm), þingstōw (place of assembly), and þrop. Here: It would be nice if you'd stop dodging the arguments that contradict you. Okay, then let's try to assume for a moment that this thoughtless statement is true. How do we explain the indisputable fact that the word þurpą and its derivatives in other Germanic languages also very frequently refer to isolated farm buildings? The usage referring to a farm has persisted in most Germanic languages. You're suggesting that the root of this word already referred to a village even before the emergence of the Germanic languages. So how can we reconcile such an ancient meaning with the fact that the Germanic languages have retained the meaning of "farm" for this word and its derivatives ? Your main argument is that you consider Gothic to be an anomaly in this particular word, that in the case of the Gothic language, the original meaning of "village" has been lost. But if we compare it with other Germanic languages, that is not really the case. It is therefore more plausible that, on the contrary, the meaning "village" was acquired later. In the Proto-Indo-European studies, the root *treb- is generally reconstructed to mean "to build, to dwell". From a strict historical-comparative perspective, linking Proto-Germanic *þurpą directly to the Proto-Indo-European root *treb- ("to build, to dwell") is methodologically problematic and far from universally accepted. Guus Kroonen is contesting this link for example. Phonetically, deriving *þurpą from *treb- requires accounting for an unexpected voiceless stop (*p) where a voiced aspirate or plain voiced stop (*b / *bʰ) would regularily be expected under Grimm's Law, often forcing scholars to lean on secondary morphological extensions, ablaut irregularities, or substrate borrowing hypotheses. Furthermore, several Indo-Europeanists suggest that *þurpą may belong to an entirely different etymological family, such as terms associated with a fenced enclosure, an outlying field, or a secondary clearing (compare with Balto-Slavic terms for courtyards or folds which seem to derive from *twer- / *tur-), rather than the house-and-dwelling semantic core represented by *treb-. Therefore, treating *þurpą as an unproblematic cognate of the *treb- paradigm relies on forced etymological equations that ignore the existence of a debate and the lack of consensus.

Reconstruction of a comparable Iron Age structure at Fison Way, Thetford

Civilis did not possess a native Batavian navy. The vessels he commanded were captured Roman ships. Earlier in the rebellion, the Batavians had ambushed and captured Roman river flotillas (Classis Germanica) based along the Rhine, as well as light coastal vessels operating in the North Sea. To pad his numbers, Civilis added local transport boats, skiffs, and canoes. Tacitus notes in this quote you shared that he rigged these captured craft and boats with particoloured plaids (traditional Germanic woven cloaks) as improvised sails, creating a colorful visual display.

This excerpt comes from Appian's Roman History (Historia Romana, Book X: The Illyrian Wars, Chapter 19). It describes the Siege of Metulum (35 BC), the capital city of the Iapydes (located in modern-day Croatia), which took place during Octavian's (the future Emperor Augustus) military campaign in Illyricum. Octavian's forces were attempting to capture the heavily fortified city by constructing a large siege mound to reach the top of the ramparts. In response, the Metulians engaged in fierce day-and-night sorties and launched counter-defenses, constructing a second inner wall as their outer fortification began to crumble. The Metulians harassed the Roman legionaries using specialized siege engines (tormenta—primarily ballistae and catapults/scorpions). Remarkably, these were not native weapons, they had been captured or acquired eight years earlier (in 43 BC) following the siege of Mutina (Modena), where Decimus Brutus was besieged by Mark Antony before Octavian’s intervention.

Nescio was against giving the abilities to other civs to capture enemy engines, he answered just after. Up to the others.

"Great Scythia" flourished across the northern Black Sea steppes, including Crimea, from the seventh to the fourth century BC. The traditional view held that Sarmatian expansion from the east caused its collapse in the early third century BC. Although Scythian culture disappeared from much of the region, the Scythians were believed to have retained Crimea and established a powerful kingdom there. This Crimean kingdom supposedly reached its height in the second century BC and pursued an aggressive policy towards the Greek cities. It subjugated Olbia, seized Chersonesos’ territories, and threatened the Bosporan Kingdom. The conflict ended when Mithradates’ general Diophantos destroyed the Scythian Kingdom, after which the Greek cities entered Mithradates’ state. Archaeological discoveries since the early 1990s, especially at Neapolis Scythica, have fundamentally revised this interpretation. The city was once thought to have been founded in the late fourth century BC as the successor capital of Great Scythia. Excavations showed, however, that the earliest remains belonged to an unrelated Tauric settlement that disappeared in the early third century BC. The site was then abandoned for a considerable period. New buildings appeared only around the middle of the second century BC. A political centre began to develop around 150 BC, followed by fortifications around 140 BC. After the settlement was destroyed by fire between 135 and 130 BC, a royal palace and stronger defensive walls were built. Only then can Neapolis Scythica confidently be identified as the kingdom’s capital. Its destruction in the late second century BC, probably during Diophantos’ campaign, suggests that the Crimean Scythian Kingdom existed for only forty to fifty years. These findings reveal a major chronological and cultural gap between Great Scythia and Late Scythian society. The last sites of Great Scythia date to the early third century BC, while Late Scythian culture emerged only near the century’s end. The two societies were also fundamentally different. Fourth-century Scythians were nomads, known mainly through burial mounds, whereas Late Scythian communities lived in fortified and unfortified settlements with flat-grave cemeteries, mostly in the Crimean foothills. The disappearance of Scythian burials from the Crimean steppe suggests that the Scythians were forced to leave the region rather than maintaining continuous control over it. In the foothills, they adopted a settled way of life and participated in the formation of a new, culturally mixed society. Local Tauric traditions played an important role, alongside Classical and La Tène influences. Most scholars therefore reject direct political or cultural continuity between Great Scythia and the Late Scythian Kingdom. The term “Late Scythian” remains useful mainly as a scholarly convention: it describes a new, settled, and culturally diverse society rather than the uninterrupted continuation of earlier Scythian civilization.

Even though I love archaeology, we shouldn't treat it as the ultimate source of truth. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. For one thing, very few Iron Age graves have been discovered in Ireland, and what we do find inside is always subject to bias. We find bows and arrows in Celtic princely graves in Central Europe, but these are hunting weapons; objectively, we shouldn't interpret them as weapons of war. The reason I support the Gauls having archers and not the Britons is simply because we have historical accounts of archers deployed in the battlefield for the Gauls. There is no such account for the Britons for our time period.

As Thalatta explained, Irish epic tales were significantly altered by external influences, in this case Christianization and the medieval historical tradition. For one thing, oral tradition is inherently timeless, oral narratives are constantly adapted to the changing realities of society. Consequently, these stories had almost certainly undergone changes before being fixed in writing. Furthermore, when monks committed the tales to writing, they adapted them even further, drawing inspiration from the Bible, the writings of Jordanes and Gregory of Tours, and other sources from their medieval context. Irish tales contain a great many anachronisms and stories that are implausible for a pre-Christian society. It is essential to analyze them with a critical eye and sound methodology in order to extract useful information. In this case, scythed chariots are voluntarily added to further enhance a supposed link between Ireland and the Near East. The Serians represent a conflation of the Syrians and the Seres (of Central Asia).

Furthermore, the Old Irish carpat (ˈkaɾ.bəd̪) for chariot can only be derived from a Celtic language. A borrowing from Latin would have resulted in a completely different form and pronunciation.

No I don't think so. Pomponius Mela is the first to mention this implausible description but he was a notorious armchair geographer. Later on, several poets mentioned the scythed chariots but they were fabricating things. Thus, no scythed chariot. The reliable primary sources do not mention scythed chariots.

Petrie crown already shared by @Ultimate Aurelian

Yes I think it is better.

There is no consensus. Experts have been debating this subject for a long time without reaching a consensus. The problem is that it is difficult in any case to explain the presence of chariots in early medieval Irish myths if we assume that they did not exist during the Iron Age. Experts are sometimes disingenuous, going so far as to claim that the chariots never existed and that the myths were fabricated from scratch by Christians, drawing on Roman writings. Objectively speaking, that’s complete rubbish, but I don’t feel like debating the issue.

There is no iron age halberds. I don't know what @Duileoga meant by Alabardero. Battle chariots are attested through the finding of horse bits (snaffles), yoking fittings (such as terrets/rein-rings), iron tire fragments and bronze axle-caps. I think several items of those categories have been reliably found in Ireland.

Andrew Martz, a former senior software engineer at World's Edge, confirmed in a separate LinkedIn post that the studio's next project was cancelled as part of its reorganisation under Activision. People made a meme about the future:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iverni https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iverni or Iverni? The earliest evidence of the Ogham is dated around the 4th century AD, it is the Silchester Ogham stone, it features an epitaph written in Primitive Irish dedicated to Tebicato maqi Memor ("Tebicatos, son of Memor"). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Irish_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brehon Okay for me if we mentionned it is a legacy of an oral institution

Only in the name. The structure itself is a plausible interpretation of what an important sanctuary could have been in the British Isles. Not based on a particular site but a synthesis of several sites.

A ram (animal) association is plausible since the Greeks and the Celts did the same. Rammabukkaz could be the proto-germanic equivalent to the High German Rammbock. I would use something with *warō ("wares, goods, merchandise"). Maybe *Warnaweraz or *Warnamannoz.

Do you really need to know that for a unit?

Personally I prefer not presuming the etymology of those tribal names. It is easier to interpret the personal names as a reference to their tribes.