Oops, there are clickies which belong to the Bronze ages: I was forgetting the Egyptians!!!
Being somewhat ocious tonight, I read this discussion and think that this discussion on construction toys is mostly on definitions.
I suppose a construction toy is one in which you construct a building (or ships). We certainly contruct buildings with Playmobil, so it would be a construction toy.
On the other side, we have that there are many sets with no construction at all. Those cannot be construction toys (except we acept dressing as construction... but this is a seoparate matter of definition... let's by the moment say that dressing is not the same of construction, just by noting there are different words for each action).
It comes the question of degrees. Yeah, it seems that a product with individual bricks leaves you more possibilities of construction than a product with four walls, a floor and a roof (of course it is an oversimplification). Indeed you have to construct more in the former than in the later. Thus, the toy with individual bricks should be more "of construction" than that with the four walls. Even then, we construct with Playmobil.
I am only using the dictionary to state what Playmobil is. You can construct with Playmobil sometimes but not always, Playmobil is a construction toy, but not just this. Can at the same time Playmobil be a construction toy and not being? Well, if one considers the Playmobil line as all its products, we must say it is partly a construction toy (for sets with construction) and partly not. We can also measure "how of construction" Playmobil is when compared with other toys by taking into account the number of originally disassembled parts that constitute each building.
Language is problematic, sometimes can make us fight defending extremes because there is no word to define intermediate "greys", or things that have one part of a way and the other of other way. As the now defunct great evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould said: "it was both things and none at the same time" (when discussing if corals were a single individual or a colony, given that a discussion raised supporting each hypothesis: corals were made of individual parts each comparable to a complete medusa -their relatives- but at the same time, anatomically and physiologically united by a common and continuous "gut"; as shown by Gould, all this problem vanishes if we do not to force reality into names, but names into reality).
