Question in terminology

[Devadatta]

Hi Gentlemen,

Recently I was thinking about terminology of oriental daggers. Most western authors call them jambiya - doesn't matter where they come from - Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey etc. So we have what we call "syrian jambiya", "turkish jambiya", "balcan jambiya" and so on.

But is this approach correct? Even if we focus on Arabian peninsula, we note the difference between Yemen and Oman - we have two different types of daggers, even though they look pretty similar, BUT I guess no Omani man would call his dagger a jambiya - they have a term khandjar. The same way I don't think a Yemeni man would use khanjar to indentify his dagger. In Saudi Arabia as far as I understand both terms are used - what we call wahhabi-style is oftenly being identifiyed as khanjar even by native arabs, but Meccan style is called jambiya.

But anyone knows, how they call jambiya-like daggers in Syria? Turkey? Kurdistan? In India I guess there is such a word jambiya - due to their historical contacts with Yemen. My point is to clarify the actual local name for what we call "jambiya" for each region. Would anyone help me?

Thanks in advance