# The Etymology of the Word Slavic



## LilianaB

It just came to my mind what the etymology of the word Slavic might be. Does it come from _slava_ - fame?


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## Ben Jamin

No, in most Slavic languages the word is spelled with an 'o', not 'a'. The 'a' is a later development in some Slavic languages. It was popular to explain that the name originated from 'slovo' (word) but this is questioned nowadays.


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## berndf

See also here, specially #11.


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## LilianaB

Thank you both of you. I would still opt for the origin of the word as coming from _slava_ rather than from _slovo_. It is definitely not from slave. I do not think this word comes from a word outside of the Slavic family and there is nothing close to slave in Slavic languages. I would opt for _slava_, as this word appears as a part of compound first names in Slavic languages: Jaroslav, Miroslav, Vladislav. In those names, it definitely means fame.


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> I would still opt for the origin of the word as coming from _slava_ rather than from _slovo_.


No, it is definitely an "o" in OSC. An original "a" is not attested to my knowledge. As Ben Jamin wrote, this is a later development in some languages.

The Greek spelling with Alpha is not too significant: It only means that Greeks heard it as /a/. As a German, I hear, e.g., the unstressed Russian "o" as in "Soyus" as an /a/.


LilianaB said:


> It is definitely not from slave.


Nobody said so; _slave_ is from _Slav_, not the other way round.



LilianaB said:


> I would opt for _slava_, as this word appears as a part of compound first names in Slavic languages: Jaroslav, Miroslav, Vladislav.


I wouldn't take it for granted that the suffix _-slav_ in those names is etymologically related to _Salv_.


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## LilianaB

Thank you Berndf. Anyhow, I will state my points. I think -o in Old Slavonic could have sounded more like -a. It definitely sounds more like -a in Russian. It would make more sense if the etymology came from _slava_, rather than from _slovo_. What has slovo to do with naming peoples? I am not really sure. Then, my theory is that perhaps some other tribes heard the Slavs calling one another Vladislav,Miroslav, etc , and they called them Slavs. This is my own theory that has no linguistic proofs so far, and it is quite vague, but still.  Perhaps the word slave came from Slav but not the other way round, in my opinion.


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## Ben Jamin

LilianaB said:


> Thank you Berndf. Anyhow, I will state my points. I think -o in Old Slavonic could have sounded more like -a. It definitely sounds more like -a in Russian. It would make more sense if the etymology came from _slava_, rather than from _slovo_. What has slovo to do with naming peoples? I am not really sure. Then, my theory is that perhaps some other tribes heard the Slavs calling one another Vladislav,Miroslav, etc , and they called them Slavs. This is my own theory that has no linguistic proofs so far, and it is quite vague, but still.  Perhaps the word slave came from Slav but not the other way round, in my opinion.


You can read more about that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_peoples, and here: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C5%82owianie, and here:http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Славяне.


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## LilianaB

Thank you. I could not find anything about the etymology of the word there.


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> It would make more sense if the etymology came from _slava_, rather than from _slovo_. What has slovo to do with naming peoples?


It is not infrequent that peoples are identified by the languages they speak, this can go in both ways, like _Deutsch (German) _means the language of the people and the people of the language. Of Greeks calling non-Greeks _Barbarians_, i.e. speakers of unintelligible languages.


LilianaB said:


> Then, my theory is that perhaps some other tribes heard the Slavs calling one another Vladislav,Miroslav, etc , and they called them Slavs.


The name of the language exists already in OCS, with "o".

There is a relation between слово and слава though: Both are believed to be derived from the same PIE root (see here) with the verb _to hear_ as the semantic commonality.


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## LilianaB

Does_ Deutsch_ mean language, literally, or word?


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> Does_ Deutsch_ mean language, literally, or word?


It means "people-ish" (i.e. what the common people do) as distinct from _Latin_, the language of the clergy and the educated. It is from _þeod _(people) + adjective suffix _-isc_ (=_-ish_): _þeodisc. _The two-way identification of people with language and language with people is very ancient.


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## LilianaB

Thank you.


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## Ben Jamin

LilianaB said:


> Thank you. I could not find anything about the etymology of the word there.


There is plenty galore of stuff about this suject: in the English article go to the chapter Ethnonym http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_peoples#Ethnonym
In the Polish to: Pochodzenie nazwy "Słowianie"
In the Russian to: Название «славяне» (there is even a separate article: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D1%8F%D0%BD


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## sotos

berndf said:


> See also here, specially #11.


Right. In medieval greek texts the slaves are _σκλαβηνοί_ or _σκλαβούνοι_ (sklavini) which is essentially the same word with slave (as forced labourer). Not sure if this is related, but in the Ottoman Empire (the successor of Byzantine Emp.) people from slavic countries were taken captives by the Tatars and sold as slaves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire#Ottoman_slavery_in_Eastern_Europe.) It is likely that the same happened before Ottoman period. Thus the synonymy.


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## LilianaB

Hi, would they be people from Slavonia or Sklavonia? I think it is a place close to Macedonia.


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## LilianaB

Thank you very much, Ben Jamin. Very interesting, but nothing conclusive.


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> Hi, would they be people from Slavonia or Sklavonia? I think it is a place close to Macedonia.


Who? Slaves captured by the Ottomans? Mainly from what is now Ukraine/Southern Russia in slave-hunting expeditions from their bases on the Crimean peninsula.


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> Thank you very much, Ben Jamin. Very interesting, but nothing conclusive.


That's what he said from the beginning. There is no conclusive evidence, just more or less educated guesses:



Ben Jamin said:


> It was popular to explain that the name originated from 'slovo' (word) but this is questioned nowadays.


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## LilianaB

I think Slavonia is a part of former Yugoslavia.


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## ahvalj

Very helpful discussion ;-)

Well, first of all, nobody knows the answer. The root "slov-" is theoretically the best candidate, especially if we look at the pair «slověne»/«němĭci», Slavs/Germans, but the major problem is that the suffix -ěn- is never attached to abstract nouns, only to geographic terms and place names. So, we come to a toponym, e. g. a river with the root Slov-: there are several candidates. To show the principle: in Lithuania there is a river Šlavė with a village Šlavėnai (http://lt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Šlavėnai). Next, if we look at, e. g., Germanic tribal names of the Roman times, we see that many of the names famous at the time of barbarian invasions, earlier, at the times of Caesar, were not in use or were names of smaller tribes. So, it is quite probable that a name of a small tribe living near a river Slov-xxx became a name of the entire people, especially if it was re-interpreted as derived from the word «slovo». Anyway, no evidence exists to date.

The name "Slavs" was the source of the term "slave", indeed. To put this into wider perspective, the Old English had a similar term derived from the name of their Celtic neighbors (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wealh).


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> I think Slavonia is a part of former Yugoslavia.


Slavonia is a region in Eastern Croatia. I'm still not getting why you want to know and what this has to do with the topic.


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## LilianaB

Very interesting. Do you think that the name of a tribe Schwab was also derived from Slav. I read it somewhere but I do not know the details.


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## LilianaB

Berndf, I just thought that the slaves were captured from this region and this is how the word slave came about.


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## ahvalj

About "a" in this name. The Slavic is the only IE language where both IE short "a" and "o" merged into "o". This is especially unusual since there are many other IE languages with such a merge, but everywhere else the result is "a" (Baltic, Germanic, many palaeobalkanic languages etc.). However, the earliest (pre-9th century) borrowings from the Slavic languages in Greek, Albanian, Romanian and Finnish usually have "a", and the very word "slav-" is an example of it. The earliest Slavic borrowings from Greek have "o" in place of the unstressed (and thus short) Greek "a", and "a" in place of the stressed (and thus long) sound (except the endings). So, there is a popular hypothesis that the Slavic originally had a reflex "a", like all its neighbors, but in the last centuries before the first records (i. e. in the 7-8th century) this short "a" became more closed and eventually became the plain "o".


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## ahvalj

LilianaB said:


> Do you think that the name of a tribe Schwab was also derived from Slav


Of course, not. In Caesar times it had the form "swēƀ-", "Suēbī" of the Latin authors.


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> Berndf, I just thought that the slaves were captured from this region and this is how the word slave came about.


It is just many of the regions named after their Slavic inhabitants, like Slovakia and Slovenia.


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