Specific Phase names for the Germans

[Thalatta]

I wasn't satisfied having just said "regarding something in particular": I mentioned Kroonen before because he gives þurpa meaning as "crowd", "which anyway blatantly contradicts your “singular first” interpretation". Then I ended up finding quite some interesting stuff:

In the 2023 dissertation "Unde vēnistī? The Prehistory of Italic through its Loanword Lexicon", by A. M. Wigman, one of Kroonen's PhD students, one can find:

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Sabellic attests to a verbal root *treb- ‘to dwell’, with a root noun *trēb- ‘house’ with cognates in PCelt. *trebā- ‘settlement’ (e-grade), PGm. *þurpa- ‘crowd, settlement’ (zero-grade), and PBalt. *trōb- (o-grade lengthened by Winter’s Law)

It doesn't seem Kroonen disagreed much with his own student for that to end in the PhD thesis… not that we didn't know what "crowd" seemed to support already.

Later on, it's stated that:

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It is interesting to note that most of the Germanic comparanda, where they contain a diagnostic phoneme, can be shown to have entered Germanic before the operation of Grimm’s and Verner’s Laws. It is a pre-Proto-Germanic stage when their consonantism can be reconstructed to match that of the other comparanda most closely

And the relevant row compares Proto-Germanic *þurpa- with Proto-Celtic *treb- (a footnote states that "a note of caution is that it cannot be ruled out that reconstructions involving the operation of Verner’s Law might be misinterpretations", showing that, although a possibility, this is not a mainstream view, unlike what's in the main text).

Finally, it's stated that many things there come "as no surprise if Grimm's Law operated in the mid-first millennium BCE", which shows this is already considered, and bears no major problem towards the reconstructions provided, making evident that this is not an issue:

On 05/11/2026 at 2:07 AM, Genava55 said:

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

Here, why are you only considering one change? There are more as part of Grimm's Law, as From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, by D. Ringe, states: "by the second change subsumed under Grimm's Law PIE voiced stops became PGmc voiceless stops". This turns *b into *p, as expected, and the third example in that very same page is in fact:

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PIE *treb- ~ *tr̥ b- ‘building’ (cf. OIr. atreba ‘(s)he dwells’; secondary zero grade in Lat. trabs ‘beam’) in PGmc *þurpą ‘farmstead, village’ (cf. ON þorp; Goth. þaúrp ‘field’);

Which also includes village as one of the meanings of *þurpą.

[Genava55]

On 06/11/2026 at 12:11 AM, Thalatta said:

Honestly, you need to find some integrity at some point and just be able to say "you know what, I was wrong with that", instead of throwing false accusations and keeping muddying the waters because your baseless arrogance doesn't allow you to recognise when it's resoundingly obvious that you've been completely cornered.

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). 

On 06/11/2026 at 12:11 AM, Thalatta said:

Yet what you did is just to shove those sources when you didn't even properly read them. Calling showing you their actual contents "appeal to authority" or "mindlessly parroting" is not going to fool anyone, so you might want to change this old defensive trope, it got a bit repetitive and boring already. Just start by reading your own sources properly, in light of what the point of the discussion actually is, and maybe that will be a bit more productive.

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

On 06/11/2026 at 12:11 AM, Thalatta said:

It's you who keeps "dodging the arguments that contradict you", even when using references first put forward by you. The real question here is, why would anyone give more weight to entries from decades old general purpose dictionaries instead of very recent specific studies on the actual matter?

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’.