Something I have always wanted to do, and Robert Elgood has already done this in a fashion in his glossaries, is to cross reference the various terms used for particular weapon forms. This would especially benefit ethnographic arms study in offering a 'thesaurus' type reference that would present terms in different contexts and languages. Often there are colloquial or vernacular terms for a type, and sometimes the terms are actually general, such as sa'if; khanda; talwar which are technically = sword, but not otherwise specified.
The name game is typically counterproductive as incomplete or unreferenced use causes confusion, and the method I often use of parenthesized alternate terms becomes clumsy. However, it still becomes the best method at hand in avoiding semantic misunderstandings for those not necessarily deeply engrained in a topic. While most of us here know and understand these variations, many readers do not, and this impairs the learning potential greatly.
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1st June 2019, 07:04 PM
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