Robots, Slaves and Orphans
The word robot, as every schoolchild knows, was coined by Karel Čapek in his 1920 science-fiction play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots. I sometimes see it claimed that robot is the Czech word for ‘slave’, but that’s not quite right (the Czech word for ‘slave’ is otrok), although it’s not entirely wrong either. In fact robota means ‘serfdom, villeinage, corvee’ and came to be used for any arduous work or drudgery. ‘Robot’ is Čapek’s back-formation from this term. There are versions of the word robota in other European languages: Arbeit in German, arbeid in Dutch (the Middle English word arveð is a cognate) and that’s because they all derive from a now-lost common etymological ancestor: *orbъ (“slave”), which itself is derived from the Proto-Indo-European word *h₃erbʰ, “to change or lose status”. This speaks to a world in which not only was work what slaves did, anybody might become a slave if their status was overturned or degraded, as for instance when a man or woman was captured in war, or a child was orphaned. Indeed, *orbъ is the root, via the Greek ορφανός, of the English word “orphan”.
So many of our stories and folk-tales concern the magic orphan, the Moses or Superman or Harry Potter figure, the special child whose orphaning is only the prelude to a story of heroism, rise and greatness — that it’s easy to forget the brute fact: that the fate of children orphaned was, for thousands of years, servitude, so much so that ‘orphan’ and ‘slave’, and now ‘robot’, are all, fundamentally, versions of this same word.
