Talk:Bordesholm

Town

I wonder whether Bordesholm should be called a town. There seems to be a problem with translating the German terms for certain types of localities into English, and aren't there also differences between American and British usage? At least in school I learnt that "town" is English for "Stadt", but that doesn't seem to be really true. It seems to me that "city" is the correct translation of "Stadt", because "Stadt" means that the community is formally granted the status of "Stadt", which is different from the status of a village or any other small township. A place like Bordesholm is nowadays officially called a "Gemeinde" (=community)(which term doesn't imply anything in the way of size of area and population). Another, older term was "Flecken", which meant a community somewhere in the middle between village and city. That is pretty much how Bordesholm may be characterized today. In late medieval times, when Bordesholm came into existence, it was certainly not a town, but just a small village, a township which didn't even have an own church (the magnificent abbey church didn't serve as a church for the general public; Bordesholm belonged to the parish of Brügge, an older nearby village). So I believe it gives a wrong impression to speak of the beginnings of Bordesholm in terms of "town". I'm not sure whether the lake, which has been called "Bordesholmer See" for ages, was ever called "Eidersted lake"; I therefore changed into "Bordesholm lake". If medieval documents actually show the other name, it should be "Eiderstede lake", because "Eiderstede" is what that very old small village (which is now part of Bordesholm) is called.