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Originally Posted by ariel
... Come to think of it, a large proportion of names for a shot-bladed weapon in all languages is just a local moniker or a derivative of "knife".
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Makes all sense; as short blades were more like basic utensiles rather than weapons, villagers had no name to call them but generally knives. It was the wealthy that spent time naming the different swords.
Trying to establish a paralelism, i have learnt that, when a nation is invaded, the successive conquerors keep on changing the spoken language in the cities, courts and palaces, while the villagers keep speaking their old language; resulting that even nowadays there are in the local language hundreds of common words that have such remote origin.
The Iberian Peninsula was invaded by Romans, Barbarians and Arabs but portuguese (for one) still has remnants of its original language, one similar to the old Hebraic, to the Ugaritic, to the Acadian.