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Originally Posted by TVV
Very logical approach, but it ignores the cultural context entirely. Apart from the location of where something was produced or assembled, the cultural context matters.
I am attaching an example. The weapon in the attached photo derives from the Italian storta, especially in terms of the blade and the guard. The blade itself was made in Europe, quite possibly Italy as well or Central Europe. It is hard to say who fashioned the grip, which is decorated in Ottoman style. If I had to make an educated guess, a descendant of Jewish migrants from Iberia seems like a plausible option. Its intended user was almost certainly a corsair of either Turkish origins or a Dutch or English renegade.
If we follow your approach, then this is really an Italian cutlass or an Italian/Ottoman hybrid. And yet, Eric Claude would call this an Algerian nimcha, even though apart from being assembled in Algeria, its parts, makers and users were not Algerian per se. He does so because these nimchas were regionally specific to Algeria, where they were used by corsairs operating out of Algerian ports.
When I refer to a weapon as Albanian or Sudanese or Viking, it is a cultural and regional attribution rather than a claim on ethnic origins. The latter is usually very difficult to lay an absolute claim on anyway.
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What you are saying only validates my point.
You call this an ALGERIAN NIMCHA precisely because it has some very distinctive features of an Algerian nimcha... while it might have been assembled in Morocco or in Egypt, or in Malta. Yet you clasify it based on the clear distinctive features. Same way a yataghan that has all the features of a Turkish yataghan is still a Turkish yataghan even if it was assembled in Bosnia.
However, if the yataghan displays some distinctive features that sets it apart from the mainland Turkish yataghans, like a characteristic front bolster and pommel or some specific decorations, then it can be considered as a Greek/Bosnian yataghan.