etymology of slave

Slave

The word slave and its Italian form schiavo merit mention here. They are both from a medieval Latin word Sclavus and its slightly later form Slavus, both of which referred first to any person who belonged to the large group of peoples of central and eastern Europe who spoke Slavonic languages. Medieval Latin borrowed the word from the Slavs’ own name for themselves. In Old Slavonic, Slovëne was the word for a Slavic person. It means literally “speaker” from Old Slavonic slovo, “word.” They were the people of the word; that is, they spoke a Slavonic language. The rest of the world spoke gibberish.

Almost every linguistic group on earth has words insulting those who do not speak their tongue. The Russian word meaning “a German person” does this: nyemets whose literal meaning in Old Slavonic is “does not speak.” But it means “does not speak Russian.” The word for baby talk, nonsense, and goo-goo in very ancient Greek was bar-bar. The Greeks thought if you were not speaking Greek, you were just uttering gibberish words like bar-bar. Such non-Greek speakers were the original barbaroi, “barbarians.” Even the philosopher Plato divided mankind into Greeks and Barbarians. Plato was also a big fan of slavery.

When did Slav come to mean “slave”? In the tenth century, during the eastward expansion of the Franks under Otto I (AD 913–973), many speakers of Old Slavonic were in fact conquered and enslaved. The change in meaning from Slav to slave occurred a little later in Italy , after the raids made by Venetians upon Slavonia during the time of the Crusades. By the time that the word schiavo had been altered and reduced to ciao, it meant simply “servant.”