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 23 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).

[Genava55]

5 hours ago, Thalatta said:

@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).

Euler and Maurer are certainly respected, but they represent the 'divergence' school of the mid-20th century. Modern computational phylogenetics (like the Ringe work I cited) suggests a much tighter 'Germanic Core' than Maurer’s 1940s theories allowed for.

Regarding the 'Elephant in the Room': Gothic is likely conservative because of the direction of semantic change. It is a documented linguistic trend for words describing land or enclosures to expand into words for settlements (think of English 'Town' from *tuną 'fence/enclosure'). It is almost unheard of for a word meaning 'village' to suddenly be downgraded to mean 'dirt field' in a single branch.

As for why dictionaries list it as 'village': Dictionaries are tools of commonality. Since the West and North Germanic branches (which cover 90% of our surviving texts) use 'village,' dictionaries list that for the sake of the user. But if you look at the etymological root *treb-, the meaning is clearly 'to build' or 'a dwelling.' A village is a collection of dwellings; a farmstead is a single dwelling. Gothic, being the earliest snapshot we have, simply catches the word before the 'collection' phase took over the West Germanic dialects.

[Thalatta]

@Genava55 But Euler’s work comes after Ringe’s. Downgrading happens particularly with things perceived as "less than": ‘villain‘ comes from Latin ‘villanus‘, meaning ‘villager‘ (which would give credence to ‘village‘ being downgraded to ‘farmstead‘ and not the other way around), or ‘sinister‘, coming from Latin ‘left-handed‘, obvious for Italian speakers. So, what happened? A downgrading for Gothic or a collection for West and North Germanic languages? Even if Gothic was the more conservative, a consensus considering many other variables was reached and written down in Proto-Germanic dictionaries. If we grab a time machine we might find out that this was the wrong call, but it wouldn’t be an error on our part, but the academic consensus, and what can one really do about that but guess.

[Genava55]

Again, as I said, in Codex Abrogans the meaning leans more towards a farmstead for Old High German. It is only later that the semantic shift happens for this branch.

Your example with 'villain' is not correct. 'Villanus' doesn't mean 'villager' nor is equivalent for 'villager'. A villanus is a peasant or a worker in a farm estate, a villa rustica in the Roman perception. 'Village' is a semantic shift appearing much later during the medieval period and once again in the same direction: from a single farmstead to a collection of farmsteads. Villanus means 'villager' only in Middle English after a borrowing from French, where the semantic shift already happened.

I don't see anything convincing for the moment to change my opinion.

[Thalatta]

@Genava55 The Codex Abrogans is from the 8th century. I shortened “villa worker” to “villager”, maybe changing the exact meaning, but the point remains that these things happened, even when they are later examples. I’m just trying to make sense of what the dictionaries actually say. Another issue could be how big these settlements are in context. You say the original meaning is farmstead, but what if a very small collection of farmsteads is also valid? At Proto-Germanic times this would have been the equivalent of a village (again, there has to be a reason why this has been reconstructed as such, besides commonality), and what meaning exactly had on the different branching languages could have turned out to be quite arbitrary and relative, Gothic could have retained a more farmstead position, while all the others considered the increased demographics. And related to this, coming back to the very beginning, what does say that þurpą has to be smaller than haimaz, which is primarily reconstructed as home? Maybe you can quote the relevant passages from the Codex Argenteus and Abrogans.