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Given this:

"Measure words for robots" (9/4/21)

and this:

"Arigatō" (9/3/21),

I could not help but think of this:

Lyrics

(source)

Wikipedia article on the song

here

Wikipedia article on "robot"

here

Origin of the term 'robot'

'Robot' was first applied as a term for artificial automata in the 1920 play R.U.R. by the Czech writer, Karel Čapek. However, Josef Čapek was named by his brother Karel as the true inventor of the term robot. The word 'robot' itself was not new, having been in the Slavic language as robota (forced labor), a term applied to peasants obligated to compulsory service under the feudal system (see: Robot Patent). Čapek's fictional story postulated the technological creation of artificial human bodies without souls, and the old theme of the feudal robota class eloquently fit the imagination of a new class of manufactured, artificial workers.

English pronunciation of the word has evolved relatively quickly since its introduction. In the U.S. during the late '30s to early '40s the second syllable was pronounced with a long "O" like "row-boat." By the late '50s to early '60s, some were pronouncing it with a short "U" like "row-but" while others used a softer "O" like "row-bought.^" By the '70s, its current pronunciation "row-bot" had become predominant.

(source)

Etymologies for "robot"

Wiktionary

Borrowed from Czech robot, from robota (“drudgery, servitude”). Coined in the 1920 science-fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek after having been suggested to him by his brother Josef, and taken into English without change.

Online Etymology Dictionary

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition

Robot has been in English since 1923, when Karel Čapek's 1921 play R.U.R. was translated into English from Czech and presented in London and New York. The play's title, R.U.R., is an abbreviation of Rossum's Universal Robots, the name of a corporation in the play that makes robots to serve as slave labor for humanity. However, Čapek's robots—the original robots—are quite different from the standard-issue robots of later 20th-century science fiction, such as C3PO and R2D2 of Star Wars, that seem to be assembled from metal, silicon, and other non-biological materials. Čapek's robots are assembled out of something like flesh and blood, made according to a secret formula. Their flesh is mixed like dough in mixing machines and their nerves and veins are spun out on spinners. Eventually, during the course of the play, the robots grow tired of their subservient position and stage a rebellion that places the very future of humanity in peril. The robots take over the world, but it becomes clear that they also feel emotions like love and are worthy successors to humanity. Robot and robotka, the words Čapek uses in Czech for the male and female versions of these sentient biological automatons, are derived from the Czech word robota, "servitude, forced labor."

Wikipedia

The word robot was introduced to the public by the Czech interwar writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), published in 1920. The play begins in a factory that uses a chemical substitute for protoplasm to manufacture living, simplified people called robots. The play does not focus in detail on the technology behind the creation of these living creatures, but in their appearance they prefigure modern ideas of androids, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. These mass-produced workers are depicted as efficient but emotionless, incapable of original thinking and indifferent to self-preservation. At issue is whether the robots are being exploited and the consequences of human dependence upon commodified labor (especially after a number of specially-formulated robots achieve self-awareness and incite robots all around the world to rise up against the humans).

Karel Čapek himself did not coin the word. He wrote a short letter in reference to an etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, as its actual originator.

In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři ("workers", from Latin labor). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested "roboti". The word robota means literally "corvée", "serf labor", and figuratively "drudgery" or "hard work" in Czech and also (more general) "work", "labor" in many Slavic languages (e.g.: Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Polish, Macedonian, Ukrainian, archaic Czech, as well as robot in Hungarian). Traditionally the robota (Hungarian robot) was the work period a serf (corvée) had to give for his lord, typically 6 months of the year. The origin of the word is the Old Church Slavonic (Old Bulgarian) rabota "servitude" ("work" in contemporary Bulgarian and Russian), which in turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *orbh-. Robot is cognate with the German root Arbeit (work).

[VHM:  cf. Japanese "arubaito アルバイト" ("work"), from Middle High German arbeit, from Old High German arbeit, from Proto-West Germanic *arbaiþi, from Proto-Germanic *arbaidiz, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₃órbʰos (“orphan”), from which English orphan is also derived. Cognate with Yiddish אַרבעט‎ (arbet), Old English earfoþe. (source)]

The word robotics, used to describe this field of study, was coined by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Asimov created the "Three Laws of Robotics" which are a recurring theme in his books. These have since been used by many others to define laws used in fiction. (The three laws are pure fiction, and no technology yet created has the ability to understand or follow them, and in fact most robots serve military purposes, which run quite contrary to the first law and often the third law. "People think about Asimov's laws, but they were set up to point out how a simple ethical system doesn't work. If you read the short stories, every single one is about a failure, and they are totally impractical," said Dr. Joanna Bryson of the University of Bath.)

Selected readings

• "Robot calligraphy" (12/27/19)
• "Robotic copying" (2/22/19)
• "Robot love" (1/5/19)
• "I, Language Robot" (10/21/19)
• "Robot Interaction Language (ROILA)" — Wikipedia
• "'Little competent donkey'" (9/18/20)
• "The hand of god" (3/4/16)

[Thanks to all Language Log colleagues and readers, especially the mysterious, anonymous commenter who calls her/himself "Robot Therapist"]

September 5, 2021 @ 7:10 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Artificial intelligence, Etymology

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