On Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 05:40:34PM -0700, Lawrence Crowell wrote: > On Sunday, April 19, 2020 at 1:20:10 PM UTC-5, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > [...] > > A nice and short explanation about word root "slav-" is being given > > here: > > > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavs_(ethnonym)#Etymology > > > > It boils down to come from "slovo" which in English means "a word". > > > > If you read on the connection between Slav and slave is made. The Vikings > did capture people of the Rus and trade them as slaves.
There seems to be a connection, but when you capture someone and trade him, I doubt they would keep pointing at themselves and saying "man, I am Slavian". I guess the origin of word "slave" may be a bit of them folks being of Slavian ethnicity and a bit because they stubbornly kept asking their masters "what is this word" (in Polish: "co to za slowo", in other Slavic languages "slowo" may be spelled more like "slavo", too). Nice way to be a PITA to whoever bought you. [...] > When the Vikings reigned supreme the western world was pretty much in > disarray. The Europeans who took the hardest blows from Vikings were the > Merovingian Franks of 500 to 700 CE. The Franks were not at any high point > of great culture or civilization either. The Vikings established one long > lasting kingdom in Normandy, which had a future big impact on Britain. The > Vikings were a pretty rough group, and if you were a Frank living in a > village that got taken by the Vikings, chances you would not live to see > the next day. The Vikings also put an end to a fledgling literary > renaissance in Ireland. I guess any other invader would do exactly the same. So there is nothing unusually brutal in Viking behaviour - slash, burn, get spoils and leave your enemies weakened. This pattern of action may be observed in all wars since the beginning of time (at least those I have read about). [...] > I know Russian, though I have not used it in over 20 years, but Russian is > easy to understand compared to Hungarian. People think German is hard, but > it really is about as hard as Russian, and both are somewhat more difficult > than French. To be honest my knowledge of languages has lead me to consider > Spanish the most sensible language in the world. I spent some time in > Budapest, and the language was difficult to work around, and I hardly > remember any fragments of it. The difficulty is that to make a statement > you have to mentally frame the whole thing completely before uttering. > English is word/time ordered and with Russian you can order things as you > want with declensions, but Hungarian is terribly tough. I enjoy deciphering texts in unknown (to me) languages, despite not knowing so many of them. Well, the more one can do with small means, the bigger the fun. With Hungarian, however, I do not even try. Maybe later. > Your name sounds Hungarian. I found it curious how common the name Atilla > was. > > The other tough language is Polish, which is a really deformed variant of > Slavic language. I never figured it out. Polish is not deformed. It is encrypted :-). My name is 200% Polish, which makes sense because I am Pole. Albeit (from what I have read) "Tomasz" is derived from Arameic "Toma", which supposedly means "a twin". My surname means "arable soil". -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com ** -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/20200420205939.GA29111%40tau1.ceti.pl.
