Weapons with an Arabian/Calimshan flavour

[Griffith Dragonlake]

I think it's vastly more likely that Naruto or Oblivion is their first glimpse into arms & armor

Sad, but probably true these days.

Really, not even historians (except the ones that just crib off the others) can agree on what various weapons were called. Read any five accounts and you'll find five different names for 'sword between 3' and 4.5', etc.

I agree about the disagreements regarding arming-swords, longswords, broadswords, backswords, war-swords, et al. And I know there is some controversy when comparing falchions and cutlasses. But where is the historian that calls a two-handed scimitar a falchion? That's a bit different wouldn't you agree? And a little bit of fact-checking by Tweet, Wiliams, and/or Cook would have told them that a falchion is a one-handed not two-handed sword.