That’s hardly a flood though. A flood is the village disappearing in day or two. Disappearing in a decade or two? I’m not sure what I would call that, but definitely not a flood.
It's not necessarily a binary thing. You can have gradual sea level rise punctuated with rapid inundation events.
This is exactly what happened in the British Isles when low lying Doggerland (between modern England and Denmark) was wiped out by a wave which was likely caused by an underwater landslide; that wave was in turn caused by the melting ice at the end of the ice age, which was otherwise causing gradual sea level increase.
True, but if you invented writing today and decided to record a 500 year old story, in that scenario are you really likely to be able to discern what the term flood meant back then, or if the word flood was even in the original story? Hundreds of years later people who weren't there are going to get lazy with the details.
I will be sure to relay your misgivings to the people displaced, once my time machine is ready. I will need to teach them English when I get there/then, so I can explain your careful distinction between a flood and ... what, an inundation? You didn't say.
I harbor doubts about their receptivity to the correction.
There are zillions of flood myths. More of them are cataclysmic like Noah and his ark, than gradual over a generation like The Pretenders' My City Was Gone.
