ln the 40Os to the 6OOs, there increasingly appeared a large family of peoples: the Slavs. The Slavic tribes diverged from each other, expanding west, east, and south. The West Slavs would become the Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks. The East Slavs would later become the Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians. The South Slavs include Serbs, Croatians, Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians.
Together, the Slavs are the largest language family in Europe. The name Slav derives from their word, meanlng that they shared
a common language. But there is also a tragic linguistic reality to note here: ln many European languages, including English, the word slave comes from the ethnic name Slav, as these peoples were raided and enslaved by their neighbors, sold in markets of the Mediterranean world.
There are several other theories that explain how this term came into being, but neither of them has been proven 100% correct.
Slava=Glory
This case seems more believable, because calling a nation “glory” would indeed be glorious. This is, however, hardly possible with Slavs, because they were a group of tribes. This is why there couldn’t be any national spirit to bring them together under this magnificent name.
Sclavus=Slave
This theory is, by far, the most popular. It is also the one that is the easiest to refute. There is some irrefutable logic behind this name. Thousands of Slavs were enslaved by Romans and Arabs. This, however, cannot define a nation, regardless of what some linguists claim.
This theory can be easily refuted by the fact that it’s historically impossible for the Slavs to be named by a Latin word. The first records of this name appeared around the sixth century in Byzantine records, and their historians were known to record the tribes they met in their travels using the name used by people themselves. The term used in those historical documents is “Sklavini”, written in Greek.
Even today some of the Slavic countries retain the names with the original root “slav”. This alone is proof enough that the name was invented by the people that lived in the region, instead of being borrowed from some other language.
Pravoslavny=Worshipper of Law
One of the more recent theories is that this name derives from a compound “pravo-slavny”. A great number of traditional Slavic names that end with “slav” give credence to it. In this case, the word will mean “worshipper”.
The most serious argument in favor of this theory is the fact that for many years, the strongest point of contact for Slavic tribes was religion. This is something that unified them, and definitely could be used as a term to define them as one nation.
Origin and Meaning of the Word Slavs slavski kolac | |
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| Education | Upload TimePublished on 23 Jan 2018 |
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