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 Tuesday at 15:18 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.

[Genava55]

2 hours ago, Thalatta said:

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.

See this lexicum :

https://awb.saw-leipzig.de/?sigle=AWB&lemid=D01106

It seems clear in the case of Old High German that farmstead and farmland are the first meaning. 

And it is even clearer that Old High German retained different meaning and different expression related to this root suggesting a general shift from the singular to the collection. The direction of the change is obviously from a singular farmstead to a collection. 

The entry breaks down the definition into four distinct historical layers:

1. The Estate or Farmstead (Hof, Landgut)
In this earliest sense, thorf refers to private property—essentially a "manor" or a "ranch."
    a) The Reluctant Guest: One citation describes a man excusing himself from a banquet: "thorph coufta ih... inti gisehen iz" ("I bought a farm/estate... and I must go see it"). This uses the Latin villam as a reference, meaning a private country estate.
    b) The Prodigal Son: In the famous biblical parable, the master "santa inan in sin thorf, thaz her fuotriti suuin" ("sent him to his farm/estate to feed pigs"). Here, the thorf is clearly a specific agricultural property owned by an individual.

2. The Village or Rural Settlement (Siedlung)
This is where the word starts to describe a collection of houses, often defined by what it isn't (i.e., it isn't a fortified city).
    a) The Unwalled Town: The text defines dorf as a "vicus"—a place that has streets but "sine muris" ("without walls").
    b) The Contrast with Cities: One example says, "manige uuesen in demo dorf, unmanige in dero burg" ("many people are in the village, but few are in the [fortified] city"). This shows dorf becoming a category of settlement size.
    c) Specific Locations: The text mentions "thaz thorf thaz dar giquetan ist Gethsemani" ("the village that is called Gethsemane").

3. The Neighborhood or Quarter (Stadtviertel)
This is a more niche use where thorf describes sections of a larger urban area, often in the plural (thorphun).
    a) Public Display: A warning against hypocrisy: "so thie lihhazara tuont in dingun inti in thorphun" ("as the hypocrites do in the assemblies and in the [streets/neighborhoods]"). Here, it translates the Late Latin vicos, meaning the public blocks or quarters of a town where people gather.

4. The "Crowd" or "Peasantry" (Menge von Bauern)
This is the most "abstract" evolution. The word for the place starts being used to describe the type of people found there.
    a) The Rustic Multitude: One entry notes a scribe used dorf to translate rusticam manum ("a rustic hand" or "a crowd of country-folk").
    b) The "Village-Dweller": The text even mentions a derivative: uillanus dorphere (literally a "villager" or "peasant"), showing how the word was used to build new social categories.

Old High German retained the direction of this change in various ways. There is no doubt about that.

2 hours ago, Thalatta said:

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?

The Gothic Bible uses the word haims to translate the Greek kōmē (village).

Place names ending in -heim (in Germany) and -ham (in England) appeared frequently during the Migration Period (5th-6th centuries). 

There are also runic inscriptions that make more sense if the root is interpreted as meaning village or community.

At least the shift looks more ancient. 

2 hours ago, Thalatta said:

Maybe you can quote the relevant passages from the Codex Argenteus and Abrogans.

The codex Abrogans is a glossary, for example it is simply written the equivalence between 'uilla' (villa) and 'thorf'.

[Thalatta]

@Genava55 Definitions 1 and 2 refer to Gl 1 and 3, both from the 8th century, so the meanings seem more simultaneous than sequential (one would need to believe the shift happened exactly there). The second line states "got. thaúrp (in anderer Bed.)", showing that in Gothic (the black sheep in all this) the meaning is different. Looking at the Old English lexicon: https://wehd.com/94/Thorp.html, the earliest reference, from 725 AD, treats conpetum, tuun, and þrop as equivalent, closer to a village than a single farm. The ending -heim doesn’t originally refer to a settlement, it’s the genitive ending of a singular personal name, as in Mannheim and Ingenheim meaning "Manne’s home" and "Ingo’s home" (or homeland), with the settlement meaning derived later.

Edited Wednesday at 21:07 by Thalatta

[Genava55]

33 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

@Genava55 Definitions 1 and 2 refer to Gl 1 and 3, both from the 8th century, so the meanings seem more simultaneous than sequential (one would need to believe the shift happened exactly there). The second line states "got. thaúrp (in anderer Bed.)", showing that in Gothic (the black sheep in all this) the meaning is different. Looking at the Old English lexicon: https://wehd.com/94/Thorp.html, the earliest reference, from 725 AD, treats conpetum, tuun, and þrop as equivalent, closer to a village than a single farm. The ending -heim doesn’t originally refer to a settlement, it’s the genitive ending of a singular personal name, as in Mannheim and Ingenheim meaning "Manne’s home" and "Ingo’s home" (or homeland), with the settlement meaning derived later.

This debate will never end, so what do you suggest?

I am skeptical about *þurpą meaning village that early on. You are skeptical that *haimaz means village that early on. 

Is there an alternative?

[Thalatta]

1 hour ago, Genava55 said:

This debate will never end, so what do you suggest?

I am skeptical about *þurpą meaning village that early on. You are skeptical that *haimaz means village that early on. 

Is there an alternative?

I’m just skeptical in ignoring what the Proto-Germanic dictionary says because of what Gothic says (which seems to have made choices opposite than the rest regarding this), when clearly this was already considered when the consensus was reached. It’s like reinventing the wheel.

An interesting thing is that þurpą has been proposed to be related to the Latin turba, and for any Spanish speaker this is clearly related to a collective (meaning something like a mob). The Italic-Germanic split happened over 3000 years ago. Uncertain, but on the table, and shows that it is not generally assumed that þurpą was a singular unit early on. Only Gothic does that (as said, “in anderer Bed.”).

With haimaz the Proto-Germanic reconstructions are home, house and village. I think there’s no way around that. It’s just like modern “home”, I could refer to my house, my hometown, or my homeland. That’s why I questioned it a bit, not that it can’t mean village (not from -heim though, but directly), but that it seemed too ambiguous.

I don’t have a better alternative, I think we have exhausted what the PGmc dictionary has to offer. Alhs can mean settlement, but it seems too singular, and many other meanings are preferred https://kaikki.org/dictionary/Proto-Germanic/meaning/a/al/alhs.html.

[Gurken Khan]

9 hours ago, Thalatta said:

it seemed too ambiguous

If it's ambiguous I think we can still use it (better than nothing) - until a linguistic crowd proves us wrong.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Gurken is right. We are well-meaning amateurs doing the best we can with the information available to us. Let's not be too strict. If something is close and seems good enough, let's run with it until we have a better source. The game is constantly being iterated and translations/transliterations/scholarship are all constantly evolving. 

[Thalatta]

58 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

the best we can with the information available to us. Let's not be too strict. If something is close and seems good enough, let's run with it until we have a better source.

This sounds like just going with what the dictionary states, which is my position, mostly because in general it would be too much work to question what they say, and because things beyond our knowledge were also taken into account. In any case, I find using warją for the fortress a more pressing issue, I don’t think it is good to have repeated words if there are alternatives, all these situations deserve a second look given that @Vantha said “that's the case for some other civs too already”.

[Genava55]

On 11/02/2026 at 9:55 PM, Thalatta said:

Definitions 1 and 2 refer to Gl 1 and 3, both from the 8th century, so the meanings seem more simultaneous than sequential (one would need to believe the shift happened exactly there).

You don't seem to understand the abbreviation. Gl stands for Die althochdeutschen Glossen gesammelt und bearbeitet von Elias Steinmeyer und Eduard Sievers. 5 Bde. Berlin 1879–1922.

For example Gl 1,242,35 means Volume 1 page 242, line 35... 

So once again you are arguing without knowing and without checking your info.

Definition 1 uses Gl 1,242,35 which is the "Codex Sangallensis 911" from the 8th century AD.

Definition 2 uses Gl 3,16,51 which is the "Codex Sangallensis 242" dated between the 9th to 10th century AD.

Definition 2 uses Gl 3,209,19 which is from a version of the Summarium Heinrici dated to the 11th century AD.

It should be noted that I had to go to the library and consult several encyclopedias to find these references. I would really appreciate it if you would make an effort before arguing from now on. 

It is important to understand that the "Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch" dictionary has a strict classification system and that the order of definitions for the same word follows a precise logic. The primary meanings are generally the oldest and/or most frequent. The aim is to provide a practical reading experience and to understand the evolution and diversification of meanings. This dictionary truly emphasizes this aspect and is known for its quality in this regard.

Once again, I am right. The primary meaning in Old High German is indeed that of a farm or agricultural estate. It was the original meaning.

I know I may sound like I'm defending something weird that nobody talks about, but it's actually something well-known in German when you're interested in the study of place names.

Let's take a recent source on the subject, Deutsches Ortsnamenbuch (2017) by Manfred Niemeyer. On page 133, there is an entry for place names ending in -dorf.

Here my translation:

-dorf. Germ. *þurpa-, Goth. þaurp, OHG / MHG dorf, MLG dorp Neutr.; through metathesis (accent shift) -trop, -trup, -druf, -droff (e.g., Bottrop, NRW). Originally ‘(cultivated) land, field, isolated farmstead’, later extended to ‘group settlement’ in accordance with the modern lexeme. Within the German-speaking area, it is an extremely productive formation type and widely distributed (though less frequent in Alemannic); in the West, some instances are as old as the -heim settlement names (SN). Different developments can be seen in the individual regions. In Bavaria, for example, with the first evidence dating back to the 8th century, the type became highly productive at the end of the older expansion period (älteren Ausbauzeit). In Schleswig-Holstein there was also a similar pattern. In Eastern Germany, in the areas of the medieval Ostsiedlung (Eastern settlement), -dorf is the most frequent generic element (Gw.) and is particularly numerous since the 12th/13th century. The -dorf settlement names predominantly feature personal names (PN) in the genitive case as their specific element (Bw.). However, this is less common in the Wolfenbüttel region, for example; this fact, combined with a relatively high proportion of abandoned settlements (Wüstungen), points toward a late period of land development. -dorf can still be used today for new formations.

 

Spoiler

I'm not making this up, it's something that's already known.

On 11/02/2026 at 9:55 PM, Thalatta said:

Looking at the Old English lexicon: https://wehd.com/94/Thorp.html, the earliest reference, from 725 AD, treats conpetum, tuun, and þrop as equivalent, closer to a village than a single farm.

No problem with that, I recognize that Old Saxon and Old English have kept mostly the collective meaning (village or hamlet). 

My point is that Gothic, which is oldest, only has the first meaning, as farmstead or farmland. 

You suggested that the Gothic language might be the one that deviated from its original meaning (this is already not very intuitive and rather inconsistent with what we generally observe in linguistics for the direction of the shift). I am disagreeing on this. 

And as I said, Old High German uses the first meaning in the oldest records. For me it is quite obvious that this is a change of meaning which is taking place at the beginning of the Middle Ages and which is not yet universal in all Germanic languages. 

There is also an interesting aspect to Old Norse þorp, a semantic analysis shows that it generally refers to a secondary or dependent hamlet, such as an isolated farm or a hamlet subordinate to a larger main village. Old Norse seems to have captured a different shift from Old English. But again, for me this is further evidence that this was a process underway during the early Middle Ages.

  

On 11/02/2026 at 9:55 PM, Thalatta said:

The ending -heim doesn’t originally refer to a settlement, it’s the genitive ending of a singular personal name, as in Mannheim and Ingenheim meaning "Manne’s home" and "Ingo’s home" (or homeland), with the settlement meaning derived later.

On 12/02/2026 at 12:11 AM, Thalatta said:

With haimaz the Proto-Germanic reconstructions are home, house and village. I think there’s no way around that. It’s just like modern “home”, I could refer to my house, my hometown, or my homeland. That’s why I questioned it a bit, not that it can’t mean village (not from -heim though, but directly), but that it seemed too ambiguous.

The concept of home is not that simple and you are taking its historical dimensions too lightly. See the concept of Heimat for example, which is very difficult to translate in other languages. You seem to have a modern perception of the concept of home. I am just saying that during the pre-Roman Iron Age, this is a very different situation. Archaeologically, we observe the proximity of different families under the same roof. 

On the topic there are two interesting work:

• Adolf Bach, "Deutsche Namenkunde" (several volumes, 1952-1956). Bach explicitly categorizes -heim names as representing the oldest layer of communal village foundations (the Urdörfer).
• Henning Kaufmann, "Die Namen der rheinischen Städte" (1973). Here Kaufmann discusses how names like Mannheim or Bad Dürkheim reflect the Frankish Landnahme (land-taking), where a leader established a collective settlement for his entire retinue.

But since they are old studies, I can simply cite the Deutsches Ortsnamenbuch (2017):

Mannheim (page 390)

III. It is a compound (Zuss.) with the generic element (Gw.) -heim; the specific element (Bw.) is based on the personal name (PN) Manno: ‘Settlement of Manno’. The dialect form Manm is likely influenced by the demonym (inhabitant name) Mannemer.

 

-heim (page 254)

-heim. Germ. *haima- ‘Home of a tribe’ (Heimat) ; in the individual Germanic languages with various stem formations and genders, e.g.: OHG heima Fem. ‘Home, homeland, residence’, late OHG/MHG heim Neutr. ‘Homeland, dwelling place, house’, OSax. hēm Neutr., MLG hēm(e) Fem. / hēm also Neutr., OFris. hām / hēm Masc. or Neutr., ON heimr Masc., OE hām Masc. ‘Village, estate’, Goth. haims Fem. ‘Village, small town’. The latter meaning likely applied from the beginning to -heim group settlements, although -heim originally occurred for individual settlements (farmsteads) as well.

The -heim names, like those ending in -ingen, show characteristics of great age. They likely occurred sporadically as designations as early as the early phase (around the birth of Christ) and then became common during the early land acquisition (frühn Landnahme) of the 3rd–5th centuries (perhaps also as a translation of the Latin villa). In contrast to the PN-orientation (personal name) of -ingen names, the defining factor here is possession (‘Home / Estate of ...’). By the Merovingian period, the type was fully established and remained productive until the Middle Ages (MA), though varying by region.

The fact that the -heim type played practically no role in the area of the Ostsiedlung (Eastern settlement) suggests its simultaneous unproductivity in the Altland (ancient lands). Most -heim names have a PN as the specific element (Bw.), usually in the genitive case. Younger names are mostly those formed with appellatives (common nouns), of which the schematically oriented ones with Nord-, Süd-, Ost-, West-, Berg-, Tal-, etc. (“Bethge-type”) certainly represent the result of Frankish-controlled naming in the vicinity of former royal estates or fisks; these predominantly arose in the 7th/8th centuries.

The geographical occurrence of -heim names essentially corresponds to that of -ingen names in locations favorable for settlement; however, a striking distribution of the two types is evident particularly in the Upper and Middle Rhine regions, which can be explained by "compensation" and "radiation," as is known from dialectology. Notable are the mixed forms -ingheim, which occur with varying distribution in Westphalia, Lower Saxony (NI), Hesse (HE), Thuringia (TH), in the Rhineland, and further south. In addition to -heim, dialectal variants are encountered early on, some of which are fixed in official settlement names (SiN), such as -ham, -hem / -hēm, -um, -em, -an, -en, -m, -n, -a, -e, or total loss (elision).

Literature: Bach DNK II, 2; Schuster I; Wiesinger 1994; Jochum-Godglück; NOB III; Debus / Schmitz, H.-G. FD

Spoiler

In your opinion it doesn’t originally refer to a settlement, but that's the case for many linguists.

17 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

If it's ambiguous I think we can still use it (better than nothing) - until a linguistic crowd proves us wrong.

I am doing it right now. Just consider the Brandolini's law and the time it takes to refute something.

Here I took the time to construct a coherent and well-sourced argument.

Edited 19 hours ago by Genava55

[Thalatta]

I do check my info and make an effort I shouldn’t even do because I’m really not interested in arguing if the accepted Proto-Germanic reconstruction is wrong, which it isn’t, and what you have to check is your tone. Re-read my comments and realise that it’s not me stating you are “defending something weird that nobody talks about”, that’s you when for example called BS on the opinions I quoted from experts in the field. “Once again” it is you who acts like a condescending 12-year-old brat that feels the disgusting need to make pseudo-patronising “Brandolini's law” comments.

 

It's not my fault if you can’t check info properly, just go to https://archive.org/details/diealthochdeutsc01steiuoft/page/n7/mode/2up, the column header meanings are on page 1. From there (and volume 3) you get the Sg. 911 and Sg. 242, which are dated from the very late 8th century (around 790 AD) and the 8th-11th centuries, respectively, as can be checked in https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch. It took me 20 minutes, no library needed (perfect place to make a condescending comment, I know, but lets have some class, shall we?). I only missed giving more span to the latter, because, again, I really don’t give a darn about spending time questioning the accepted reconstruction. I’m just giving evidence on why things are how they are, while you keep digressing towards centuries apart changes and ignoring any source that contradicts you regarding what matters: Proto-Germanic, from 500 BC to 1 BC.

 

The only relevant thing is if haimaz is better or not for what is wanted. Nothing else. Luckily, I think I found exactly what’s needed: https://folksprak.org/common/material/pdf/A-Grammar-of-Proto-Germanic.pdf, which states that the Germans did not form villages but rather lived in isolated homesteads. Old Norse heimr, Old English hām and Old High German heim mean house or home, while Gothic uses haimos (only appearing in accusative plural) for village, and translates agrós 'land' to þaurp 'land, lived-on property', like Old Norse þorp 'farm, estate'. In West Germanic it means 'village', as in Old English þorp, Old High German dorf. In Gothic weihs 'village' also translates agrós.

 

This is exactly what I meant with the demographic change, þurpą means what we need because there were no such things as proper villages, and both it and wīhsą seem to refer to whatever was there, call it land, property, farm, estate, with surely an extended family or more, and in the eyes of the Romans. I don’t see how any of them would be smaller or less appropriate than haimaz (taking from ON, OE and OHG). All this is exactly what the preferential reconstructions (are ordered entries important or not? Or is it just cherry-picking?) from the PGmc dictionary are telling us: haimaz is “house” first, “home” second, and “village” last, for þurpą the order is “village, settlement”, “gathering of people, crowd”, and “cleared land”, and for wīhsą it’s just “village, settlement”. All fits perfectly. If one travels in time it will look like a big farm or estate, conceptually it was the closest you could get to a village. They were not thinking in Phase I, II and III. And, as I said before, some branches kept it literal, while others kept the concept (which is what matters), and depending on each word.

 

You are not going to convince me that the dictionary is wrong because, considering the source I cited and all the methodologies used that go way beyond your knowledge, it just isn't. If you have a problem with that, just take it to the ones that put it together, and use whatever word you want, I have better things to do honestly.

Edited 1 hour ago by Thalatta

[Genava55]

31 minutes ago, Thalatta said:

which states that the Germans did not form villages but rather lived in isolated homesteads.

Ground plan for the village of Grøntoft in its last year. Grøntoft existed from around 450 to 150 BC. For most of the period it comprised of 12-20 buildings and accommodated around 50 people and 70-80 animals:

Aerial photo of the fortified settlement in Borremose, Himmerland. Borremose is known for and identified with a former fortified settlement dating from the Pre-Roman Iron Age (400-100 BC). It was constructed during the 4th century BC, as one of the largest structures of its kind in Northern Europe, but was already abandoned during the 2nd century BC, when the houses were burned down and the whole site levelled to the ground. 

A plan showing the fortified settlement Lyngsmose, Ringkøbing. The rectangular houses are protected by a moat. There had been 15 long houses and two small houses. It is believed that around 8-10 people lived in each house, which means that there were around 120-150 people living in the village. The settlement was occupied between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD. 

Reconstruction of the Iron Age village of Hodde, which was located between Varde and Grindsted. As can be seen, Hodde was somewhat larger than Grøntoft. At its greatest extent it included 22 farms, blacksmiths and potters workshops. The village Hodde existed in the last century before the birth of Christ. It was a large village; at its peak, it included 27 farms with 53 houses and 200 to 300 inhabitants. Each farm was surrounded by a fence and the whole village was surrounded by a palisade as high as a person. 

 

But thanks for the effort.