Slavs and nemtsy

[Jolanta M. Davis]

So, it seems nobody really knows where the word "slav" came from, doesn't it?
According to a few English etymological dictionaries I checked the word
came into English from Latin and Greek and used to be used in Greek for a
group of people that lived in Eastern Europe. Interestingly, the same word
also was used to mean "slave" a person in bondage to someone. It seems that
the first meaning was that of a group of people and then that of a slave.
I couldn't find a slavic (Russian, Polish, etc.) etymological dictionary so
I couldn't check what the Slavic language dictionaries have to say about
the origins of this word. In quite a few books on early Slavic history I
found just a mention that the word might have come from "slovo"--word, to
denote people that can communiate with each other, or it might have come
from "slava"--fame. But I couldn't find a reference to a work that
discusses the subject fully. Does anyone really know for certain where this
word came from, in what language it was used first, and how it spread?
thanks

Jolanta



At 11:09 PM 9/21/00 , you wrote:
> > that if the Prussians were originally
> >not a Germanic ethnicity (anyone want to write an article on the
> >etymological links of Prus' and Rus'?)
>
>Not unless in  a spirit of satire.  The two ethnonyms are originally quite
>distinct.
>
>"Prus"  has hardly changed since it was first recorded, in C 9 AD, and the
>root cannot be broken down further.
>
>"Rus", however is from Old Scandinavian "Roths(menn)" "rowers" (cf.  Finnish
>"ruotsi", Estonian "roots" (referrng to Sweden; this does get a bit
>complicated; see Struminski: Linguistic Interrelations in Early Rus, which
>everybody should read closely)
>
>Robert Orr
>
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