"Slav": An Etymology

This is sure to enrage one or two people, but it's worth discussing, even so.

I've long been aware of the claim that the word "Slav" and "slave" had identical roots, and I've also seen more than my share of vehement denials of any such identity by people of Slavic descent who can't stand to think that their glorious ancestors might have had such a humble past. Still, I never bothered to actually look at the origins of the terms until today, and what I found was most interesting:

[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).”

I can well understand why people of Slavic descent would find this revelation troubling: as I've said before, we'd all like to think the best of our ancestors, the better to bask in their supposed glory. Unfortunately, the reality is that all of us have much to be humble about if we go back far enough: even as "noble" a personage as Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg Gotha has for an ancestor William the Bastard (according to the Royal Family's own website), and if we go back further a few hundred more years, all her ancestors are illiterate Germanic tribesmen either fleeing the wrath of the Huns or eking out a living on the northern outskirts of Roman civilization.

What's especially interesting about this little etymological expedition is the context in which it came about: I'd run into an online account of the travels of the Arab diplomat Ibn Fadlan, who'd been sent as part of a mission to the King of the Volga Bulghars in 921 AD. His account of the people he called the "Rus" (by which is meant the Scandinavian tribe that originally bore the name before bestowing it on Russia by conquest) is quite an eye-opener, and as is to be expected, there's been many an effort to cast doubt on the reliability his accounts, most of them unconvincing in my opinion. Following are some of the more unflattering excerpts:

They are the filthiest of all Allāh’s creatures: they do not clean themselves after excreting or urinating or wash themselves when in a state of ritual impurity (i.e., after coitus) and do not wash their hands after food. Indeed they are like asses that roam .

[...]

They gather in the one house in their tens and twenties, sometimes more, sometimes less. Each of them has a couch on which he sits. They are accompanied by beautiful slave girls for trading. One man will have intercourse with his slave-girl while his companion looks on. Sometimes a group of them comes together to do this, each in front of the other. Sometimes indeed the merchant will come in to buy a slave-girl from one of them and he will chance upon him having intercourse with her, but will not leave her alone until he has satisfied his urge. They cannot, of course, avoid washing their faces and their heads each day, which they do with the filthiest and most polluted water imaginable. I shall explain. Every day the slave-girl arrives in the morning with a large basin containing water, which she hands to her owner. He washes his hands and his face and his hair in the water, then he dips his comb in the water and brushes his hair, blows his nose and spits in the basin. There is no filthy impurity which he will not do in this water. When he no longer requires it, the slave-girl takes the basin to the man beside him and he goes through the same routine as his friend. She continues to carry it from one man to the next until she has gone round everyone in the house, with each of them blowing his nose and spitting, washing his face and hair in the basin.

His description of Viking burial practices is even more revolting: the impression one gets of the male Vikings is that they never pass on an opportunity to press themselves on their slave girls, and even a burial ceremony is just one more excuse to engage in an orgy of sex and deadly violence. Before anyone comes along to make the claim that the Vikings were not the dirty, sex-crazed brutes of popular legend, I suggest reading this post, which does rather tend to cut the ground out from under the feet of the "Kinder, Gentler Vikings" revisionists.

What's the moral of this little story? To the extent there is one, I'd say that it points out the foolishness of taking either pride in, or feeling shame at, the circumstances of one's ancestors; pride and shame aren't any more hereditary than is guilt - or at least they shouldn't be.

Comments

[james]

i don't many people think vikings were kind and gentle

[Abiola Lapite]

Their descendants would certainly like to think so. You'd be surprised how many webpages are out there claiming the Vikings have been "unfairly" portrayed, or that their bloodthirstiness was a "myth."

[razib]

abiola,

on the vikings, well, i think the problem is that people don't have the whole picture in mind. that is, vikings = scandinavian, and vikings = savage, ergo, scandinavian = savage. of course, vikings were a subset of scandinavians, freebooters who were 'going a viking.' an appropriate analogy would be to judge all germans by the behavior of the teutonic knights (who waged wars of extermination against the pagan wendish slavs and baltic prussians) or the french by the behavior of the crusaders. the problem is that the scandinavian societies did not truly enter full high literacy until they became christian, so we don't know as much about the inner world of their minds aside from their sagas (which also emphasize action & adventure) as we do of their material skills or the exploits of their diaspora.

to the slavs: i also believe that al-alandalus had one of the largest contingent of slav slaves (who at one point rebelled and became corsairs in the western med. if memory serves), and many of the turkish padishas were the sons of slavic women from the harem. the last 'turkish' padishas were likely mostly slavic by ancestry.

p.s. genghis khan's clan were partially hunter-gatherers who were mocked as 'rat eaters' by other mongol tribes. they learned to regret that.

[Mrs Tilton]

I am neither a linguohistorian nor an historicolinguist, but surely the inference to draw from the article you cite is that 'slave' is a derivative meaning? A group calling themselves not 'slaves' but 'famous people' (or perhaps 'laudable people'?) wound up as The Oppressed; for The Oppressor, the name 'famous people' became (whether in a spirit of cruel mockery or of dry description) synonomous with 'slave'. Had it been the other way round, we'd be calling the Slavs 'the Doules' or something similar. So the situation for the Slavs is very much the opposite of that for, say, the Welsh (to themselves, the Cymri; to the Saxon and, unwittingly, the rest of us, 'the foreigners').

That said, it is perhaps understandable, but nonetheless very silly, to become upset over the fact that one's ancestors had a hard time of it, or even that the name of one's people reflects the fact (even if secondarily). We are all of us descended, at one distance or another, from tapeworm-infested illiterate mud-daubed grunting savages (or indeed, if one cares to go back a bit farther, from something rather like a tapeworm). And as for names, the Slavs can give as good as they get. Russians call the Germans Nemtsy and SFAIK the word in the other Slavic tongues is cognate. Perhaps it's folk-etymology, but my understanding is that the word derives from nemoj, 'deaf'; i.e., deaf-and-dumb, because the Germans did not understand Language, i.e., Russian.

I've often wondered (as long as we're nattering on about the names of peoples) why the Germans, more than any other people I can think of, have such a variety of names in non-German tongues. To themselves (and to Scandinavians, and to Italians) they are Teutons (deutsch, tysk, tedesco). To us they are German, to the French they are Alemanni and to the Swiss they are (at least in pejorative slang) Swabians; and, as we have seen, to the Slavs they are deaf-mutes. To some degree this is perhaps down to the very late coalescence of the gaggle of more-or-less Germanic tribes into anything resembling a unitary nation (let alone nation-state); their neighbours might well have conceived those German tribes they met as isolated groups rather than parts of a larger whole.

[Abiola Lapite]

"but surely the inference to draw from the article you cite is that 'slave' is a derivative meaning?"

Yes, you're right, but an etymology of the word "Slave" wouldn't have had quite such an eye-catching ring to it ...

"To some degree this is perhaps down to the very late coalescence of the gaggle of more-or-less Germanic tribes into anything resembling a unitary nation"

I think this is the correct explanation of things. Even the apparent cohesion of groups like the Franks, Vandals, Jutes etc. only seems so in retrospect; we're talking about societies in which groups of warriors detached and attached themselves to (un)successful leaders all the time, in the same manner as various Bantu-speaking groups gathered themselves around Shaka in the 19th century and subsequently began to call themselves "Zulu."

[Abiola Lapite]

"the problem is that people don't have the whole picture in mind. that is, vikings = scandinavian, and vikings = savage, ergo, scandinavian = savage. of course, vikings were a subset of scandinavians, freebooters who were 'going a viking.' an appropriate analogy would be to judge all germans by the behavior of the teutonic knights (who waged wars of extermination against the pagan wendish slavs and baltic prussians) or the french by the behavior of the crusaders."

I don't know that this is such an outrageous standard of measurement. It may be that the Scandinavians of yore weren't quite as bloodthirsty amongst each other as they were abroad (how could any society long survive if this were so?), but that doesn't mean that the Vikings were only a few bad apples in a generally decent barrel, anymore than the Crusades were evidence of a peacable Western Europe, or the Teutonic Knights of the quietist tendencies of medieval Germans. Anyone wishing to draw certain conclusions about, say, the value system of the Romans, from the behavior of their legions abroad, would have been more than justified in doing so, despite the fact that most Romans had nothing to do with fighting once the Pax Augusta was established.

Such groups can only flourish in societies that don't look askance at their activities, and there is plenty of evidence - from archaeology, Germanic folklore and so forth - that the Scandinavians were very much a warlike people, just as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes once were, and the Frisii of Tacitus' day before them also were. A peace-loving society of highly-cultivated farmers just doesn't breed the sort of warrior-glorifying mythology we see common to all the Germanic peoples. Indeed, the Western Roman Empire wouldn't have been on the defence against marauding Germanic tribesmen for nearly 5 centuries had they been anything but brutal and keen on warfare.

[edward]

Just a small point. Slave in Spanish is esclavo.

Also it does seem that the centre of the medieval slave trade was the Netherlands, and that the slaves where in fact sold to the Caliphate in Al-Andalus (my source here is Ronald Findlay, but I can't find the link). Funny how times change.

[DavidRom]

It is interesting to wonder why so many peoples of Arab origin in the Middle East resemble Europeans to a great degree. There is an old stereotype that the " I dream of Jeannie" female blonde slave was always been in great demand in the harems of Bagdad and elsewhere. Maybe the Vikings like modern day pimps only fulfilled this high demand for good looking blonde girls. Not a very politically correct thought. But remember history teaches us that basic human nature never changes over the centuries.

[Theodor Lebar]

To understand the word "Slav", you would have to know the Slovenian language. I am Slovenian and speak 5 other languages. Slovenian is the oldest Slavic language, according to some German linguists. If you knew Slovenian, you would discover that it goes far beyond being the oldest Slavic language. In Slovenian, as in other Slavic languages, the word "Slava" means glory, as in "Glory of Christ or Glory of God". The versions of this word in Slovenian are: Glory-Slava, as mentioned above, but also, proslaviti, proslavljati, slaviti, sloviti, etc. etc. The latter words mean to Celebrate, but in the highest sense of the word. If you read Herodotue, pliny, Tacitus, Prokopius, etc. you would know the Slavs,as, not tolerating any government or king. They live in low houses, grow grains and breed mules. The central place in Slavic life is a "Community". When they have to decide something either good or bad, they gather for a discussion, and decide jointly. When I left my (very remote) village in Slovenia, in 1953, this was still exactly so. So, this brings us to the word Slav, Slava which is not only the Glory, but also "Fame", not to be confuesed with fame in western languages as popularity. Only a being highly evolved in a spiritual sense, can be "Famous". The others are just popular. So, Slavs, like others, would Glorify God, Jesus Christ, great saints, etc. They would also Slaviti, or Proslavljati, that is, celebrate, both in an adjectival sense, their communal life, their harvest, their moon and sun, their beautiful folk dances and songs, their marriage, which was considered sacred. When I left my village in 1953, there was no concept of divorce as yet in anybody's memory. Slavs did these things long before any stupid colonial westerner equated the word Slav with the word slave. It just goes to show the ignorance of western people, that is, their total lack of knowing anything about other people and their languages, which enables them to come to such naive conclusions about Slav and slave.

Regards, Ted Lebar.

[stan striz]

So much rubbish as here , unbelievable. Go to Wikipedia, the slavic people, there u get answer. [Yeah, as everybody knows, Wikipedia is an authoritative and carefully curated resource immune to tampering ...] Theory connecting slav and slave is simply racist, residuum of 18th century british imperialism and racism and have nothing to do with reality. [Yup, Chinese have been enslaved, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Romans, West and Central Africans, Arabs, Indians - but Slavs are unique in all of human history in never having known slavery!] It is funny to read how masses of slav girls were enslaved by arabs, well where are those blond blue eyed arabs today? Nonsense, all nations were victims of injustice, exploitation and rape at one time or another. [So why do you attempt to deny it? Aren't Slavs part of "all" in your world?] Lets look at superior british jackasses. First keltic people, conquered and raped by romans, then german saxons, then vikings, danes, normans, today flood of blacks and arabs, thats that pure superior stupid british nation. Please, give me a brake with your stupidity.Connection between slav and slave is just about as between german fahrt and english fart. Although this is probably closer tan slav and slave.I also like armenian name Hovnanian which in my language means man of shit, also knew german named Kokot what in my language means dick. Yes languages are very interesting, but it is funny to read opinions of bunch of amateurs as we are [Uh huh, rank amateurs like the OED and Webster's Dictionary.]. Also aj know guy from Finland ,Mahomakky co in my language means a guy with soft dick and so on and so on. Please, first educate yourselves and only than start putting your wisdom on the paper [Take your own advice before spewing illiterate, self-defensive nonsense online in a vain attempt to preserve your fragile sense of pride. - A.L.]