Comments on: Robot Or Not? http://www.botjunkie.com/2008/05/23/robot-or-not/ Jonesing For Robot News Sat, 20 Mar 2010 17:30:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: tojo2000 http://www.botjunkie.com/2008/05/23/robot-or-not/comment-page-1/#comment-1156 tojo2000 Sun, 25 May 2008 11:41:09 +0000 http://www.botjunkie.com/2008/05/23/robot-or-not/#comment-1156 I can't believe he screwed up the etymology of the word so badly. Here's a quote from Wikipedia, although I think I first learned it from the Foreword of a collection of short stories about robots: <blockquote cite="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot#Etymology">The word robot comes from the word robota meaning literally serf labor, and figuratively "drudgery" or "hard work" in Czech, Slovak and Polish. The origin of the word is the Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude" ("work" in contemporary Bulgarian and Russian), which in turn comes from the Indo-European root *orbh-. Robot is cognate with the German word Arbeiter (worker).</blockquote> I can’t believe he screwed up the etymology of the word so badly. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia, although I think I first learned it from the Foreword of a collection of short stories about robots:

The word robot comes from the word robota meaning literally serf labor, and figuratively “drudgery” or “hard work” in Czech, Slovak and Polish. The origin of the word is the Old Church Slavonic rabota “servitude” (“work” in contemporary Bulgarian and Russian), which in turn comes from the Indo-European root *orbh-. Robot is cognate with the German word Arbeiter (worker).

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