Karud: the weapon that did not exist:-)

[kai]

Wow, there seems to be a huge amount of emotional attachment here!

If it were not for the Europeans and others that first took the time to collect, name, research and preserve these weapons were would we be today, and they did it without the internet, I think its wrong to try and erase their contribution to the history of these weapons, even if not always linguistically correct, we owe a debt to these people.

We're all standing on the shoulders of giants. (Well, rather lots of shoulders from along the normal distribution with only a minority of intellectual giants thrown in... )

While the longstanding collecting interest of rulers as well as lots of well-of folks worldwide certainly helped to rescue examples of material culture from the vagaries of conflicts, social change, climate, etc., we should not forget that the colonial/postcolonial times were (and still often are) not fair - not all "acquisitions" either...

However, knowledge is not carved in stone but evolves continually. There will always be changes and it doesn't help to cling to mere words, especially if current usage is shown to be based on misunderstandings or errors.

Discussions rarely lead to universally accepted results, even in an academic setting. A wise human being once remarked that outdated ideas often die with their long-time proponents...

Here we rarely deal with rigorously established scientific facts that lead to clear results; we rather have a vast pool of diverse experiences and knowledge and its free sharing by active forumites yields very valuable insights. I'm sure we can live with some diversity including divergent point of views!

Regards,
Kai