Specific Phase names for the Germans

[Obelix]

@Vantha found out, that the Germans are the last Civilization lacking of Specific names for the three Phases (#4667). Community historians, do you have tips or pull requests on hand?

[Genava55]

Haimaz, Wihsa, Burgz

Haimaz for home, hamlet, village.

Wihsa for village or settlement in general.

Burgz for town, stronghold.

[Thalatta]

4 hours ago, Genava55 said:

Haimaz, Wihsa, Burgz

Haimaz for home, hamlet, village.

Wihsa for village or settlement in general.

Burgz for town, stronghold.

Maybe wīhsą could be written like that. There’s also þurpą (the root of thorp and German Dorf), and alhs can also mean settlement. I’m not sure what would be the size ordering for all these and haimaz, which sounds too much like home for me, but it apparently did mean village also.

[Vantha]

Thanks. I made a PR and went with "þurpą" -> "Wīhsą" -> "Burgz". "Haimaz" is also the root of the German "Heim" (which basically means home), that's why I decided against it in the end. "Burgz" is already used for the Germanic fortress, but that's not a problem, since that's the case for some other civs too already.

 

https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8722

 

[Thalatta]

17 minutes ago, Vantha said:

Thanks. I made a PR and went with "þurpą" -> "Wīhsą" -> "Burgz". "Haimaz" is also the root of the German "Heim" (which basically means home), that's why I decided against it in the end. "Burgz" is already used for the Germanic fortress, but that's not a problem, since that's the case for some other civs too already.

 

https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/8722

 

Warją could be used for the fortress, it means fortification (also embankment or dam), and it's the root of the German "Wehr", meaning defence.

[Genava55]

Beware that a reconstruction doesn't really determinate its meaning. 

The meaning is generally deduced from the descending languages inheriting the root. 

A reconstruction generally means we have no evidence for this word in Proto-Germanic, we are relying on later evidence from descending languages. 

The Gothic language is well documented from the 4th century AD onwards. That's the earliest Germanic language with significant information. 

Most of the other Germanic languages are really documented from the 8th century AD only. 

The usage and meaning of certain words can have changed significantly between two Germanic languages simply because of the time that has passed.

For example the word *þurpą became þaurp in Gothic, which means farmland or farmstead, since it is used in the Gothic bible to translate the word agrós. In Old High German, the word became thorp and it seems it is used in the Codex Abrogans (8th century AD) to translate the Latin vicus or villa, not in a large village meaning but more as a farmstead. But in Old Saxon, it seems the word changed its meaning and became used to designate a hamlet or a village. 

Edited 5 hours ago by Genava55

[Thalatta]

@Genava55 but þurpą has been reconstructed as village because many other languages that come from Proto-Germanic have been studied and that was the conclusion reached. Gothic is an example of East Germanic languages, which were already unintelligible to West and North Germanic languages by around 200 AD, and for almost all of them the meaning is village, þorp in Old Norse for example. That Gothic is the "earliest Germanic language with significant information" doesn't mean it is the one that kept the original meaning, this would imply that all the others changed, even when they split before the time of the Codex Argenteus.

[Genava55]

1 minute ago, Thalatta said:

@Genava55 but þurpą has been reconstructed as village because many other languages that come from Proto-Germanic have been studied and that was the conclusion reached. Gothic is an example of East Germanic languages, which were already unintelligible to West and North Germanic languages by around 200 AD, and for almost all of them the meaning is village, þorp in Old Norse for example. That Gothic is the "earliest Germanic language with significant information" doesn't mean it is the one that kept the original meaning, this would imply that all the others changed, even when they split before the time of the Codex Argenteus.

I don't see it that way. It is mainly Old Saxon and Old Norse from the 8th century that show this semantic shift, while Old High German shows an interpretation closer to that of Gothic. And languages do not always diverge abruptly; Germanic languages continued to interact for a very long time, and certain semantic shifts can become popular in one language or another depending on the context of the time. 

And your claim that Gothic was already unintelligible to West and North Germanic languages is BS. I can suggest you the following readings:

• Hans Frede Nielsen: The Germanic Languages: Origins and Early Dialectal Interrelations (1989). He explicitly argues against early, sharp divisions.

• Don Ringe: From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic (2006). He supports a rather slow and gradual divergence and considers Gothic to be very close to Proto-Germanic as it has been reconstructed. This is the "gold standard" for the timeline of Germanic divergence.

• The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics: Specifically chapters on "Proto-Germanic" and "Early Runic," which describe the 1st–3rd centuries as a period of relative linguistic unity.

[Thalatta]

@Genava55 those books are over 20 years old (almost 40 in the first case), studies now support the notion that they were mutually unintelligible, for example linguist Wolfram Euler’s (curiously, yes, related to the famous mathematician) Das Westgermanische summary, https://www.verlag-inspiration.de/euler-das-westgermanische, already states “by the time of the Gothic translation of the Bible, Western and Eastern Germanic were already so dissimilar that Gothic and for example Frankish people could not have held a fluent conversation”. He got his PhD in 1979 but maybe you can send him an email stating that his work is BS anyway :P. Philologist Friedrich Maurer states that Old English, Old Dutch, Old Saxon, Old Frisian and Old High German (which has the word dorf) were already quite different early on, instead of just branching off from a common Proto-West Germanic, and for all those languages the meaning is village.

In any case, even if we are dealing with scholars not agreeing among themselves (and we can cite their books ad infinitum), the elephant in the room is still the same: why not to think that Gothic was the one that suffered the semantic shift? And, more importantly, why has þurpą been reconstructed in PGmc dictionaries as village? (https://kaikki.org/dictionary/Proto-Germanic/meaning/%C3%BE/%C3%BEu/%C3%BEurp%C4%85.html).