--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:
> *****GK: "robota" ("labour" attested 1386) in
> Ukrainian."nee" ("no") in Ukrainian. Cf. also "rab"
> "rob" ("slave") "roba" ("female slave" attested 1352).
> I believe the word "robota" also exists in
> Polish.*****
I'm sorry, my formulation was too fast to be accurate. What I intended
to say was something along the following lines:
_robota_/_rabota_ definitely is not the Common Slavic word for 'work'.
It is a transparent derivation built on robU/rabU 'slave' originally
meaning something along the lines of 'the condition of being a slave'
(or even 'the illness of being a slave'), which it still means in Old
Church Slavonic. If one would want to look for a Common Slavic word
meaning 'work' the best bet would probably be _de^lo_, but lots of
language don't have a generalized word for 'work' in our sense because
in pre-modern societies the work the peasants and agriculturalists that
constitute the core of society do cannot be separated from the
household. (I have come across old-fashioned speakers of Dutch who
avoided the word 'work' in favour of circumlocutions with 'do', or even
just 'do' without an object, like "Ik heb vanmiddag te doen", litt. 'I
have to do this afternoon', meaning 'I'm booked'.) It is no accident
that the modern Slavic languages have several different words
for 'work', like Czech _pra/ce_ and Slovene _delo_ and SCr _rad_.
Moreover, the suffix -ota cannot be brought under the same heading as
the Germanic element continued in Germ. -eid.
Willem