emptywheel

Robota is Slovak, praca in Czech

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't robota the historical work in Czech? I guess I'm interested in when they ditched it, as compared to 1920 RUR publication.

Not sure,but what I know that praca was used much more in Czech republic. I'm Slovakian and we used word robota more, then praca.

práce is from the Old Czech, and when I say "Blame Jungmann" it is because during the National Revival when he and Dobrovsky were setting out to recreate the literary language, they often went back to old forms

RUR's actual Czech title is "Rossum's Universal Robots" (in English)--so it comes from the Czech play but in a weird way via English. So "Robots" is doubly coded as foreign in the original--contrary to the "make everything authentic and old" traditional Czech linguistics

My favorite linguistic moment ever was when a young women (b. 1979?) I was on a tram with said "happy endink" unironically.

And in Russian it’s closely linked to “раб”, or slave. Which might be the key.

Right, but English Robot clearly comes from Capek's robota. I guess my question is why Czech doesn't use that as a verb anymore but Russian does?

Punting here; over last 100 years Czech has broadly tacked away from the influence of slavophile Russian toward a more Western European worldview. This has linguistic consequences too.

Compare in Russian the well-known example where there are two words for “freedom”. There’s “свобода”, the more abstract or intellectual concept of “liberty”.