Originally posted by SportyMB
Originally posted by dr_strangecraft
The term most English-speakers use for that great ethnic group is "Slav"
So guess where the English word "Slave" comes from . . . .
Holy crap, I never thought of it like that....
good point
Mmm Slavic comes from old English, deriving from the Romance side of the language, and is Sclave, deriving perhaps from Sclovus, which means to be a
member of a language or speech....
In my best guess, what this would imply is that the Slavic Tribes where varied and had their own sub languages, essentially meaning an ethnicity that
was wide spread and spoke many languages (people of many languages?)
However, in Latin, Sclavus was also the root word for Slave, and the English word Serf. It could be that the word Sclavus was adopted for Slaves in
the Roman Empire because many of the slaves came from Germania, Gaul, and the Baltic (Slavic region) .. Essentially the slaves where from a vast
veriety of regions, spoke numerous languages and where thus, people of many languages.
So whether the word Slave derives from the description of the slaves as matching the same definition as the Slav's is really unknown ... Rome nor did
any one else, really use Slavic people specifically for slavery.. Roman slaves could be Roman.. and they came from all over..
But that is just how languages progress...
Take Celtic for instance.. Celtic is Celtoi in Greek and means Barbarians ..
Even though England was the only one to conquer Hibernia.. which is in it's self Greek ... oddly it means "winter like" lol ... any ways it would
appear at some point in history some prominent Greeks ran into some unruly Irishmen and the name stuck, declaring them savage cannibals.