Sunday, May 13, 2012

robots....

I like robots, at least the nice kind, like rosie from the jetsons and wall-e....but where did the actual robot name come from?

"The word robot was coined by artist Josef Čapek, the brother of famed Czechoslovakian author Karel Čapek. Karel  Čapek was, among other things, a science fiction author before there was something officially known as science fiction, in subject matter along the same vein as George Orwell. He introduced the word in a play called R.U.R.  The full title translating into English as Rossum’s Universal Robots, which debuted in January of 1921.
While writing this play, he struggled to come up with a word to name the robots, initially settling on ‘laboři’, from the Latin ‘labor’.  He discussed this with his brother, Josef, and Josef suggested ‘roboti’, which gave rise to the English ‘robot’.  ‘Roboti’ derives from the Old Church Slavanic ‘rabota’, meaning ‘servitude’, which in turn comes from ‘rabu’, meaning ‘slave’." --todayifoundout.com

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