Sword Work and Technical Vocabulary

At this point I can safely say I have studied, am studying, or am at least passing-familiar with no fewer than four historical or modern sword schools (in rough order, SCA sword and board, Fiore, shinkage, and montante courtesy of Figueyredo), and am currently working my way through Windsor's translation of Vadi.  This has introduced me to a serious problem - technical vocabulary.  In any profession, technical vocabulary or jargon accrues, but because there are few true modern practitioners of sword work, the technical vocabulary winds up being exceptionally obscure, and cause for argument.

We know that this has been a problem for a while, too.  For instance, Fiore trained under a series of Germans and north Italians, which means he would have been familiar with the German technical vocabulary, probably learning the same technical vocabulary developed in Liechtenauer's Zettel.  The problem, then, is that Fiore wasn't working in Germany.  Some of his students were clearly Germans, and he probably spoke German, because of his studies, but the majority of his time was spent among Italians.  Thus, we see certain German guards - the Crown, the Window - translated straight into Italian, and where he doesn't have an original, he simply makes up a picturesqe, brain-catching name - the Lady, the Boar's Tooth.  You will note that I am giving the English-language names.  There's a reason for this, and it's basically the same reason Fiore did.  To understand that, we have to look at another book entirely - Erdbaumechanik.

In the early 20th Century, civil engineering was in a state of flux.  The massive structures of the 19th Century had led to a whole range of innovations - steel bridges, portland cement, reinforced concrete - but most of them rested on over-engineered foundations, because foundations had a tendency to be inconsistent and knowledge of foundation construction was as much art as science.  This was the environment into which Karl von Terzaghi entered, starting in 1904 by combining the study of advanced mathematics, geology, and what we would today call transportation infrastucture - roads, rails, and airfields.  This would culminate in him writing the foundational text of geotechnical engineering, Erdbaumechanik auf Bodenphysikalischer Grundlage ("The Mechanics of Soil Construction Based on Foundational Principles of Soil Physics").  Terzaghi had worked in Austria, Croatia, Russia, Germany, and Turkey, and additionally spoke fluent French and English - well enough to teach in those languages, and as any modern graduate student can tell you, "fluent enough to order dinner" is not "fluent enough to explain concepts in a meaningful manner."  When he moved to the United States at the tail end of the 1920s, he completely switched languages to English, and while Erdbaumechanik's 1924 edition was in German, the 1943 was called Theoretical Soil Mechanics - as has been every subsequent edition (although Terzaghi's book has been largely replaced by Terzaghi and Peck, and later Terzaghi, Peck, and Masri).

We see the same sort of behavior in period sources; there's a copy of Fiore called Die Blume des Kampfes and the Paris manuscript, probably written under his supervision, is Flos Duellatorum.  Vernacular instruction, not specialized archaic-language terms, were the norm.  This becomes more and more evident the closer you look at the old names - Winden is literally "to wind."  Moulinet is "little windmill."  Hell, even Nagashi is "flowing."  Plain-language, vernacular teaching appropriate to the time and place is the way swords were taught in-period, and calling things posta di donna or Pflug is a deliberate archaism that doesn't help the student.

There are, of course, left and right limits to this, as with all things - if a group shares a common technical vocabulary, then that vocabulary needs to be used consistently even if it is archaic.  This is the main reason clerical Latin (or for that matter the Hebrew language) is still a thing, in fact.  Japanese, from my experience, is terrible for this.  Sometimes - jodan (high position), chudan (mid-position), or gedan (low position) - it is simple and straightforward.  Sometimes, concepts that make perfect shorthand sense in Japanese, such as jo-ha-kyu (roughly, "overture, crescendo, denouement"), it is almost impossible to translate in a meaningful or at least comprehensive fashion, because how can a single stroke of the sword break down that way? It does, but that's not taught using words.  The words are only there as a supplement.

To summarize, when teaching anything, swords, soil mechanics, or salvation, teaching needs to be in a form that accommodates both the complexity of the material and the student's ability to comprehend it.  Words, where required, should not be an impediment, but a supplement, and if a word's meaning is precise enough in the local vernacular to capture the intent in the original, the original is nice to know, but the vernacular is the one you use to teach.  If you need the student to know the word in the original language, you develop the common vocabulary as part of the lesson, and do not use the vocabulary as an exclusionary principle.  If you cannot approach the vocabulary in a fashion the student can comprehend, you should not be teaching.