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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

The root just means work or worker in Slavic languages. See also robotnik (worker) in Polish. But that wouldn’t make for a clickbait article title, now would it?

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Robota means different thing in czech than rabota in other slavic languages. Czech robota means corvee. There are different words for corvee in other slavic languages - "barshhina" (in russian), "panshhina" (in ukranian, polish and belarusian, spelled a bit differently in each), and rabota in them means any work, in czech work is called prace.

Edit: This is a good example of "false friends of a translator" - words in different languages that sound similar but have different meanings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend

That said rabota and robota still have a common root which means slave in most slavic languages. So how is it the czech is such an outlier is a curiosity.

It might have to do with the Czech National Revival[1]. The Czech language and culture was being suppressed in favour of Austrian/Germanic one. Prominent Czech figures worked to preserve the Czech language which included distancing from German words and phrases, redefinition of words and even invention of new ones.

It was pretty much a success and we ended with what could be called Czech 2.0. How many false friends were introduced because of the Revival, I am not sure.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_National_Revival

In this article [1] i see quite a lot of funny examples of false friends for czech to russian translation. Stale is cherstvyj in russian, but in czech cherstvyj is fresh. A corpse in russian is a torso in czech. Shame is attention. A cigarette butt is a cucumber. Toadstool is buckwheat. Looseness is speed. And so on. Some words like zivot in czech are closer to old russian meaning (life) than current (stomach). Between some i can see some other relation. And with some i have no idea how it could coincide that way.

1. https://zen.yandex.ru/media/solo/takoi-zabavnyi-cheshskii-ia...

It's funny to see how languages branch out and develop independently. I specifically remember that Czech "Šukat drogy na záchodě", which means "To fuck drugs on the toilet", would be "Look for medicine in the west" in Polish. I'm not 100 % sure that the Polish is right but it shows pretty well how large the overlap between Slavic languages there is. And also how many false friends we have.

Corvee is a great term to bring up here, because some of the comments below strike me as being along the lines of “but corvee means chore in French, how can it mean forced labor in English?”

The article specifically calls out Czech, not Slavic languages in general, as the root. According to Wiktionary, at least, robota does mean forced labor, so jumping to conclusions about clickbait titles might be a little premature.

googling for "origin of word robot" says that it's from "robota" which means (allegetly) forced labour in Czech which agrees with the article which says the same: "forced labor, as done by serfs".

That is also closer to the meaning than just "labour" or "work" in my own eastern europen language.

googling "Czech word for forced labour" says: "nucené práce" googling "Czech word for slave work" says: "šetřit práci"

Robota is originally a specific type of forced labor. Think of the word "draft" in english. It is forced labor for the army.

you probably made a typo because "šetřit" means "save".

also it's not slave work, but serf work.

Even more interesting is that fact that the English word "slave" basically is "Slav".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs_(ethnonym)

many slaves in Ottoman Empire were of Slavic origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean%E2%80%93Nogai_slave_ra...

not sure why the downvotes. I suppose some people believe that slavery existed only in USA, and consider it offensive to suggest otherwise.

Dystopian is a pretty good way to describe a play where the human race is destroyed, wouldn’t you say?

It's not the worst outcome ... the human race becoming subjected to the robots could be considered worse (but then I guess we'd be talking about The Matrix instead).

> See also robotnik (worker) in Polish.

TIL robotnik is more than a cool-sounding video-game character name.

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