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

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 skläv s) “Slav,” which appears around 580. Sklavos approximates the Slavs' own name for themselves, the Slov nci, 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.