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Re: Slavs and colonialism, most of the money that built the Italian city of Genoa in the 1100s to the 1300s came from selling and facilitating the selling of Sl
by paganel 6y ago
Re: Slavs and colonialism, most of the money that built the Italian city of Genoa in the 1100s to the 1300s came from selling and facilitating the selling of Slav war prisoners (i.e. slaves) captured and transported from the Northern shores of the Black Sea to the Constantinople area (i.e. on the Southern shore).
- asa4akj 6y agoThe word slave actually comes from Slav
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoI had the same reflex, but the OP did not write that "Slav" means "slave", they worte that "war prisoner" signified "slave".
- paganel 6y agoIt's still kind of disputed, that's why I left that out of the conversation. Forgetting for a moment about the English term "slave", it's interesting that in Italian slaves are called "schiavi", with the singular "schiavo", while in old Romanian we used to called Slav people (who were different from us, Romance-speaking people) as "șchei", with the singular "șchiau/schiau", the second form at singular pretty similar to the independently formed "schiavo" from Italian (which means "slave", like I said).
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoAnd in Greek, we say "Σλάβος" (Slav) which is only one word away from "σκλάβος" (sclave) so I've always thought that the two were connected, until very recently, when I checked wikipedia just to be sure and found out that I was probably wrong.