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Originally Posted by katana
I agree, but with limited knowledge of the German language it is extremely useful to me.
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Just to avoid any misunderstandings: my posting was in
no way meant to attack personally. I just wanted to point
out that the language spoken today is quite different from the language spoken 150 years ago.
Even today it is very difficult for a non native speaker (sometimes even for native speakers) to follow a conversation in certain parts of germany.
Starting 1838 the brothers Grimm compiled a dictionary with the goal to contain all german words since the 16th century, their meaning, and their origin.
It was not finished until 123 years later (of course not by the brother). It has 32 Volumes and explains about 320.000 index-words. So if you want to figure out something about a german word you look it up first in Grimms dictionary.
As i know you and most others in the forum don't speak
german i took the freedom to look it up for you and translate the main findings. Sadly - reading my own post - i understand that this could have been misunderstood as arrogance. I apologize for that (and for this post for that matter).
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Originally Posted by katana
[...]
To make such a bold statement you must, in fact, know why 'eisenhauer' is on some blades. I was just suggesting that the mark may not be a sign of the quality of the steel but, an indication of the skill of it's manufacture. It may help....it may not....it is just an suggestion.
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What i wanted to state is the following:
Even if we found linguistic evidence of the origin of the term "Eisenhauer". There is still no evidence why it ended up being etched onto a blade.
We have the thesis that it just a special word that stands a high quality of craftmanship, like a family name.
This would make sense if the inscription was made only for advertisement and "Made by dwarfs in their magic kingdom by repeatedly striking at iron" would be too long to fit on the blade
We have another thesis mentioned right in the first post that it is a quality seal that ensures a special ability.
In this case the ability to cut-iron. Makes sense too,
as it is useful for advertising and very precise in what
kind of special ability the blade has. I think this is the
most likely.
We have the third thesis that i posted in my last post.
That it originally meant the ability to cut iron but later
evolved into another word for convex grind. Less useful
for advertising but even more precise in a certain
property of the blade.
But after all it is all speculation.