An interesting bit of etymology that I learnt recently.
The English word “fencing” (as in sword fighting) comes from English “defence”, from Old French “defens”, from Latin “defendere”, meaning “to ward off, defend”.
The French word for fencing is “escrime”. The Italian and Spanish words are also close cognates with French. “Escrime” comes from Old French “escremir”, from Frankish “*skirmjan”.
That means English, a Germanic language, gets its word from Latin, a Romance language.
And the Romance languages of French, Spanish, and Italian get their word from Frankish, a Germanic language.
Essentially, the Romance and Germanic language families did a trade.
I did a little broadsword and shield fighting long, long ago. I never actually read those books. Here’s a link to a woman on Youtube. she’d done a lot of stage fighting and really knows her stuff.
Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/@JillBearup
Unfortunately, she’s also a transphobe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfMFRdL_gTI
(I actually hadn’t seen that video before just now, and am watching it as I write this. I stopped following her in 2022 after she did a crossover with Tom Scott, which led to wider attention on her transphobia, and to her being dropped from Nebula. I assume the video will cover those, but it’s the discussion from at that time which I was already familiar with, not anything more recent.)
It never came up in any of the videos I watched. I’ll delete my comment.
Yeah, I think she’s learnt to keep her politics outside of her actual videos. She doesn’t want the broader audience knowing about how transphobic she is, because, well…many of them would stop watching.
It’s tweets, blog posts, Patreon, and the like, instead. Where only the most hardcore fans will see.