Mozilla Open Source Support: First Awards Made

> Do the Czechs have a multi-hundred year history of en-robot-ing a substantial percentage of their current population that I missed out on?

The word "slave" itself comes (with high probability) from "Slavs", the population that for centuries have been exploited as, well, slaves. [1] Current Czech Republic was home to part of the Slavonic population. [2]

[1] http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/181477
[2] http://www.andrzejb.net/slavic/

Well, of course, slavery has existed at some point in most parts of the world, including central Europe.

Actually the word robot is used in Hungarian to describe the work the serfs were forced to do for their landlord. It happened through hundreds of years (serfdom was only abolished in 1848). Although serfs weren't technically slaves, but for example they were not allowed to move. So the word robot could be considered as offensive as slave.

Yes. Bohemia (the predecessor of the Czech Republic) had de-facto slavery in form of serfdom, which had been finally abolished in 1848 (the first steps happened in 1781). Serfs were freely sold and bought and couldn't even marry without their lord's permission.

The word "robota" itself meant the mandatory/forced work the serfs had to do on their owner's land before they could tend to their own fields. So "robotnik" means "the one who does the mandatory work".

Personally, I find this drive to remove every "offensive" meaning to be somewhat ridiculous and pointless. Even counterproductive since it blurs the difference between people struggling against real discrimination and "professional offendees" screaming against imaginary offenses.

Egads... Has any of you bothered to read the damn thing? R.U.R, that is. Rather than arguing about the origin of the word, recall what had it been applied to at the first use. Čapek hadn't been all that subtle there - his robots are (originally) subsentient humans, mass-produced to do all the hard and dirty work and to leave the humanity to the life of leisure. Incapable of emotions and will of their own. Biological, BTW. As could be expected, later it turns out that they can develop said will of their own, with predictably nasty consequences for their masters. In the end a couple of them somehow manages to develop the full range of emotions as well (and it's quite obvious that the rest is on the way to at least some of that), with the implication that the life will somehow go on. Except that the character delivering that conclusion is more than slightly insane by that point and quite desperate to convince himself that everything would somehow work out...

BTW, the word "otrok" is directly applied to them and that's the word used when translating English "slave", including the contexts refering to slavery in US (fun example of a translator trap, that - e.g. in Russian an identical cognate is a somewhat archaic equivalent of "подросток" == "teenager". Judging by other slavic languages the original meaning was (male) child/youngster, shifted in Czech and Slovak at some point. Not sure when the shift had happened; it certainly isn't unique - consider e.g. the nastier meaning of "boy" in Southern dialects of USAnian)

FWIW, the original is in public domain; see http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13083; an English translation is on https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/capek/karel/rur/