by cameo-d 5 Replies latest jw friends
Do you ever wonder what's in a word?
"Slave". The Slavic word for slave is... "robot"
The word robot itself comes from Czech robota, which means "servitude; forced labor"
"A robot is a person who works mechanically without original thought, especially one who responds automatically to the commands of others."
(This makes me think of the automatic scriptural answers that are ejected at the mention of a "trigger word" in a conversation.)
Rossum's Universal Robots
[Middle English sclave, from Old French esclave, from Medieval Latin sclvus, from Sclvus, Slav (from the widespread enslavement of captured Slavs in the early Middle Ages); see Slav.]
Word History: The derivation of the word slave encapsulates a bit of European history and explains why the two words slaves and Slavs are so similar; they are, in fact, historically identical. The word slave first appears in English around 1290, spelled sclave. The spelling is based on Old French esclave from Medieval Latin sclavus, "Slav, slave," first recorded around 800. Sclavus comes from Byzantine Greek sklabos (pronounced sklävs) "Slav," which appears around 580. Sklavos approximates the Slavs' own name for themselves, the Slovnci, surviving in English Slovene and Slovenian. The spelling of English slave, closer to its original Slavic form, first appears in English in 1538. Slavs became slaves around the beginning of the ninth century when the Holy Roman Empire tried to stabilize a German-Slav frontier. By the 12th century stabilization had given way to wars of expansion and extermination that did not end until the Poles crushed the Teutonic Knights at Grunwald in 1410.·As far as the Slavs' own self-designation goes, its meaning is, understandably, better than "slave"; it comes from the Indo-European root *kleu-, whose basic meaning is "to hear" and occurs in many derivatives meaning "renown, fame." The Slavs are thus "the famous people." Slavic names ending in -slav incorporate the same word, such as Czech Bohu-slav, "God's fame," Russian Msti-slav, "vengeful fame," and Polish Stani-slaw, "famous for withstanding (enemies)."
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The Bohemian language is a predecessor of the Czech language. In the old Slavic,"robot" is derrived from the word Rab.
Well cuz Milos never mentioned that before!
Sure he will find it quite interesting and I can use that at Czech Fest next year.
Reminds me I owe him a semester of teaching in the next 5 years.
LOL lets put a jw robot in the ring with a rock em sock em robot!
In the Apocrypha
" Satan was the seducer and the paramour of Eve, and was hurled from heaven together with other angels because of his iniquity (Slavonic Book of Enoch, xxix. 4 et seq.). "
(could this mean that Cain was the son of satan? )
The Second Book of Enoch (usually abbreviated 2 Enoch, and otherwise variously known as Slavonic Enoch or The Secrets of Enoch) is a Jewishpseudepigraphicapocalyptic text of uncertain date and unknown authorship. The text has been preserved only in Slavonic, but this has certainly been translated from Greek. It is widely held that the Greek version may itself have been a translation from Hebrew or Aramaic. Dates ranging from the 1st century BC to the 10th century AD have been proposed, with the late 1st century AD often preferred. It was rediscovered by Professor M. I. Sokolov in 1886 in the archives of the Belgrade Public Library.
