Authors

Discussion

The paper discusses the Savic concept of ‘muteness’ in reference to all aliens, first and foremost, Germans as the nearest neighbors. The forms like dial. U nimota (coll.) ‘the mute people’ and ‘Germans’, also nimkenja (f. sg.) ‘mute’ and ‘German’, nimuvatyj ‘stuttering’ and ‘silent’, dial. R govorit nemo ‘(he) speaks inarticulately’ and others allows for advancing a new perspective of the semantics of ‘muteness’ in the respective Slavic terms going back to the late Common Slavic period. To reevaluate late Common Slavic němьci ‘the mute people’ we analyze a semantic parallel in the Arabic name akhras (pl khurs, akhārīs) and also bukm (sg abkam) ‘mute; dumb’ (Ibn Manẓūr; Dozy) to refer to Slavic slaves in Andalusia and North Africa from the early 9th century onward. The concept of ‘muteness’ in reference to foreign peoples who by default cannot speak Arabic, including the white (Ṣaqālibah) and black (Sūdān) slaves, was rather common among in the early medieval Arabic-Islamic records. The gloss abkamu clearly holds connotation of stuttering, mumbling, inability to speak clearly, whence the meaning ‘stupid, silly’. This connotation is different from the meaning of Gr βάρβαροι ‘all non-Greek speaking people’ as opposed to the designation of Greeks as Ἕλληνεϛ ‘Hellenes’, who were able of speaking an intelligible language. Importantly, the concept of ‘muteness’ later tended to acquire connotation of color (race) prejudice like ‘mute; Negro’ (Corriente 1997). In view of the Arabic parallel, the question is the following, could Slavic němьci mean originally not only ‘the mute people’ but also ‘the dumb people’? If so, there are grounds for agreeing that the term slověne could initially mean ‘the people who can articulate, speak intelligibly’ and serve as an antonym to LCS němьci ‘mute/dumb people’. Only later the term slověne became an ethnic or rather group (professional) identification ‘Slavs’ attested as early as 947 in the works of the Arabic historian and geographer al-Mas‘ūdī.