Will they rename the longboat to something different and Vikings to Norse?
considering that all the screenshots show the existing longboat model, but no new longships, i wouldn’t be surprised if this was just some AI hallucination or a human making a mistake, and they just made the longboat regional.
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I think the civilization will stay the same.
For the longboat/longship I think they made an error on the steam page because in french version they write : drakkar, the actual name of the longboat in french. Also no new ship showed.
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there is strong evidence that teh vikings will at least still be called “vikings”, as they are listed on the steam page as one of the playable factions in the campaigns.
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Maybe they just changed the name from Longboat to Longship because the latter is the more accurate term. Though “Longboat” was kept in AoMR…
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So we have Vikings, Danes, Varangians, but werent Danes and Varangians also Vikings?
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I’m confused – “more accurate” in what sense? They’re both modern English words for the same thing, neither is in any way more correct than the other. The OED tells me longboat is used almost 10 times as frequently than longship, and has always been more commonly used as far back as their records go. That suggests to me longboat is the better choice since it’s more likely to be understood.
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The Wikipedia articles on Longship and Vikings use “Longship” exclusively. In the AoE Wiki article on the AoE2 unit, an editor wrote that “A longboat is an unrelated type of ship’s boat that was invented around the 16th century.”
I don’t know what term is more commonly used nowadays in the English-speaking world when people talk about Vikings, the above is just what I saw.
Yeah Longboat is technically a different ship. But at the end names are things that change over time, and at the end it’s only important that the people you are talking with understand what you mean.
I assume they just renamed the Longboat to Longship and made it a regional unit. Since Longboats are heavily featured in all the screenshots they are likely available to all the new civs, besides the Saxons. Maybe going to replace the Galley line, which implies that it will have a Feudal Age version. The Danish civ descriptions hints at them having some early Longship/boat bonus too.
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Sounds like you’re trusting amateur sources over professional ones, and assuming that a word can have only one meaning. The OED has the following definition of longboat:
A long, narrow, double-ended ship of a type associated particularly with the Vikings. Cf. longship n. 1
It’s weird that the Wikipedia page doesn’t even mention the word longboat as an alternative, but that’s probably a case of a single Wikipedia user making a choice (and, perhaps, actively defending it – I’ve known Wikipedia users do that before even when other users correct errors).
It’s true that there’s another unrelated boat with the same name, but words can – and often do – have more than one meaning. No one plays AoE2 as Vikings, sees the unit called longboat, and thinks “why do the Vikings have a 16th century ship’s boat?”.
The Longboat will indeed be called a Longship, but the Vikings will continue to call it that…
Yes, it’s the same situation as with the Slavs. All over again.
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I had just taken a quick look, didn’t want to imply that longboat is utterly wrong. Though we have seen that devs are also influenced by Wikipedia (I only say Thirisadai). I’m not blindly trusting wikis, but often use them to get some basic information quickly. There are also mistakes and hoaxes, and it has happened more than once that incorrect information from the extremely popular Wikipedia was uncritically spread even by professionals, sadly.
Regarding longship/boat in connection with Vikings, I made a search at the Internet Archive covering the 20th century works they have (before the Wikipedia days), and both terms were in use then. That “longboat” is not given as an alternate term at all is unusual indeed. The “amateur” counterpart of OED, Wiktionary, also makes no connection between longboat and the Vikings.
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Yes, basically everybody trusts wikis and amateur sources frequently for all kinds of things, and it’s perfectly reasonable to do so in most situations. I’m quite lucky to have full OED access through my job, so I usually use it for checking any English language things.
The thing that I think is really a red flag about the AoE wiki article is the sentence immediately before the one you quoted:
The historically correct term for this type of vessel should be “longship”.
Whenever I see anyone claiming that a particular use of a word is “correct” or (by implication here) “incorrect”, I’m immediately sceptical because that isn’t really how language works (except in some limited technical contexts). But the idea that there is one correct word for something seems to be compelling for a certain type of person, and I suspect the wiki contributor who wrote that is that kind of person.