Slavs and nemtsy

[Andrew Jameson]

Dear Iolanta,

Maybe we internet and email people have forgotten about libraries?!
I'm sure Harvard has lots of good Slavic etymological dictionaries!

You can't really ask for scientific proof in this field, but the concensus
seems to be that the three words slyt', slava and slovo are closely
related and of Indo-European origin: Tsyganenko gives: kleus>sleus>
slouos>slovo; the ancient collective ethnonym "slovene" denotes "people
speaking a common language"; slava is probably a back formation
from a form of the verb sluti to speak, meaning "much spoken about".
All of this is within the Slavic speaking community.
The term for slave in Slavic was "rab" which is linked to the present
day words for "work" but also meek "robkii" and child "rebenok".

The use of the ethnonym "slovene" to denote slave is really a matter
of Germanic, Latin and Greek etymology, nothing to do with the
Slavic languages.

Refs:
Tsyganenko GP, Etymologicheskii slovar' russkogo yazyka,
Kiev, Radyans'ka Shkola, 1989.
Chernykh PYa, Istoriko-etimologicheskii slovar' sovr. russkogo
yazyka, M, Russkii Yazyk, 1994.

Andrew Jameson
Chair, Russian Committee, ALL
Languages and Professional Development
1 Brook Street, Lancaster LA1 1SL UK
Tel: 01524 32371  (+44 1524 32371)
----------
From: Jolanta M. Davis <jmdavis at FAS.HARVARD.EDU>
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
Subject: Re: Slavs and nemtsy
Date: 22 September 2000 21:27

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

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