[This entry is taken from a chapter of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]
This is Part 7 of Slaves and Slavery: Go to Part 1
Lat. sĕrvus: Eng. serf ~ Sp. siervo
As we
have seen, the word for ‘Slav, Slavic person’ in Medieval Latin, sclavus,
came to be used for a person who was the property of another, a ‘slave’, both in
Medieval Latin and in all European languages, whether they descended from Latin—the Romance languages, such
as Spanish—or not—mostly the Germanic languages, such as English. But, as we saw
earlier, slavery was also practiced in the Ancient Roman world, which was actually
a slave society, not just a society that had slaves. So, what were these slaves
called in classical Latin?
The word
for ‘slave’ in Latin was masc. sĕrvus – fem. sĕrva (sĕrv‑us/a), which is the ancestor of the
Spanish word siervo/a and of the English word serf, and is also at
the root of the cognates Eng. servant ~ Sp. sirviente. In this section
and the following ones, we will explore these words and a few others that
contain the Latin root sĕrv‑. The genitive wordforms were
masc. sĕrvŏs / fem.
sĕrvae,
and the accusative masc. sĕrvum / fem. sĕrvam. In addition, Latin had a
related adjective sĕrvus/a/um that has bee defined as ‘slavish, servile, subject’ and, in
legal speech, ‘liable to certain burdens, subject to a servitude’ (L&S), as
in the expression homo sĕrvus ‘servant man, slave’.
Dictionaries
define Lat. sĕrvus/a ()
in a number of ways, e.g. ‘a slave, servant, serf, serving-man; a female slave,
maid-servant’ (L&S). Lat. sĕrvus/a has been translated into English
though the years as either slave, servant, or serf, even though
servant and serf do not have the same connotations of the individual
in question being the property of another the way that the word slave does,
or Lat. sĕrvus
had, as we shall see. Lat. sĕrvus/a is usually translated into
Spanish as either siervo, which is a patrimonial word that descends from
Lat. sĕrvus,
or as esclavo.
It is
not clear what the source of Lat. sĕrvus/a in Proto-Indo-European was, though
some have reconstructed it as *ser-wo-s, meaning ‘guardian’, which was perhaps
formed from the verbal root *ser‑ ‘to watch over, protect’. This etymology
is by no means uncontroversial. We will get back to this topic when we discuss
the two verbs that are presumably derived from this root.
As
we just said, Spanish inherited the Latin word sĕrvus/a as siervo/a, a patrimonial
word, that is, one that was transmitted by word of mouth, not borrowed from
Latin later on, which is how Spanish got half of its Latin vocabulary (cf. Part
I, Chapter 1). Actually, the masculine siervo came from the accusative wordform
sĕrvum
of the Latin word, not from the nominative sĕrvus, and the feminine sierva
came from the accusative wordform sĕrvam, not from the nominative
wordform sĕrva.
The sound changes we see are the expected ones. The most noticeable one was
that the stressed Latin short ‑ĕ‑ changed to the diphthong ‑ie‑
in Old Spanish, as it always did without exception in patrimonial words (cf. Part
I, Chapter 10; when Latin short ĕ was
unstressed, it became Sp. e, a contrast that we can observe in many
stem-changing verbs).
The pronunciation of the letter 〈v〉, which was [w] in Latin,
also changed, to [β] in Spanish, even though the spelling did not. The
accusative inflection ‑ŭm,
as always, changed to ‑o in Spanish, by the loss of the final consonant
and the lowering of short ŭ to o, two other very regular and totally expected sound
changes in the transition from Latin to Old Spanish.
Sp. siervo
continued to mean ‘slave’ in the early Middle Ages, while the practice of slavery
lasted, though at some point it started to compete with the synonym esclavo,
as we saw earlier in the chapter. After the word esclavo fully took over
the meaning ‘slave’, siervo continued to be used in a few specific contexts
such as the Biblical one, the medieval bondage condition of ‘serf’, and in
particular, religious submission to God, since there was a long tradition of Christians
seeing themselves are God’s slaves, as in the expression siervo de Dios
which refers to a ‘person who serves God and keeps his precepts’ (DLE).[1] Another
common term in Spanish Catholic tradition is sierva de María ‘Mary’s slave/servant’
and there are many female religious orders whose name includes the phrase siervas
de María.[i]
One specific
type of siervo was known in earlier times more specifically as siervo
de la pena ‘servant of punishment’, which referred to people sentence to
life working in mines or other public works.[2] Sp.
siervo was used in the latter Middle Ages with the meaning ‘serf’, that is
‘a member of the lowest feudal class, attached to the land owned by a lord and required
to perform labor in return for certain legal or customary rights’ (AHD). To specify
this sense of siervo one may use the phrase siervo de la gleba ‘serf’,
a legal term that the DLE defines as ‘slave attached to estate who remained attached
even if the owner changed’.[3] These
were rural slaves of local extraction, not imported, who thus did not look different
from non-slaves. In other words, one crucial difference between medieval serfs
and the slaves of ancient Rome or the American slaves of later times is that
medieval serfs (Sp. siervos de la gleba) were locals and physically and
culturally identical to non-serfs. The English word serfdom (Sp. servidumbre),
developed in English from the noun serf, referred to ‘the state of being
a serf or the system by which the serfs worked on the land’ (CALD) in the
Middle Ages under the system of feudalism or the feudal system, which was ‘a
political and economic system of Europe from the 9th to about the 15th century,
based on the holding of all land in fief or fee [Sp. feudo] and the
resulting relation of lord to vassal and characterized by homage, legal and
military service of tenants, and forfeiture’ (AHD).[ii]
Serfdom
and feudalism are most strongly associated with medieval France, England, and the
Holy Roman Empire (approximately, modern Germany and northern Italy), not so
much with other European lands, including the kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula.
The practice of tying tenant farmers to the land actually goes back to the late
Roman period, the 4th century, but feudal serfdom did not start in Europe until
the 9th or 10th century, after the breakup of the Carolingian Empire. In Medieval
Iberia, and in particular Castilian lands, most workers were free workers, not serfs,
so serfdom was not as big a part of society in Iberia (what would become Spain
and Portugal) as it was in other parts of Europe. One idea that was borrowed
from French feudalism in Hispania was that of regarding the various lands of a
king as patrimonial possessions, something which resulted in many divisions of
territories during the Middle Ages.[iii]
The Spanish
word siervo/a was not used to mean ‘slave’ in modern contexts after the
introduction of the word esclavo/a, such as to refer to the slaves of
the colonial period of the Spanish Empire. For that, only the word esclavo/a
is used, as we have seen. Even to refer to slaves in the ancient world, the
word esclavo/a is the one preferred except in contexts in which the word
siervo/a may be used, either to keep with tradition or else in order to sanitize
the practice in the Bible, for instance.
The cognate
of Sp. siervo/a in French is the patrimonial word masc. serf [ˈsɛʀ(f)], fem. serve [ˈsɛʀv]. This word only has the
medieval ‘serf’ meaning, and by extension it is also used to refer to the serfs
in Russia and other European countries, whose serfs were not emancipated until well
into the 19th century (e.g. Russia: 1861; Spain: 1812, 1837; Austro-Hungarian Empire:
late 18th century; France: 1789).[iv] Only
rarely is the French term serf used to refer to other slaves (synonymous
with esclave, ilote), and even less commonly for other figurative
senses in which the meaning is more like ‘servant’. For those senses of Sp. siervo/a,
French uses derived the terms serviteur or servante, as we shall see,
cognates of Sp. servidor and sirviente respectively (see below).
English
borrowed the word serf from French in the late 15th century to refer to feudal
peasants tied to the land at a time when there were pretty much no such serfs in
Great Britain anymore. As we saw earlier, the main meaning of this word in English
refers to the Middle Ages, as in the first sense given for this word in the American
Heritage Dictionary: ‘a member of the lowest feudal class, attached to the land
owned by a lord and required to perform labor in return for certain legal or customary
rights’ (AHD). As in the case of this word’s French source, this meaning can be
extended to similar practices in modern times, such as in 19th century Russia: ‘an
agricultural laborer under various similar systems, especially in 18th- and 19th-century
Russia and eastern Europe’ (AHD). The third sense for the word serf to be found
in this dictionary is a more general one, which is also a less common one, namely
‘a person in bondage or servitude’ (AHD). Note, however, that the word serf
is not used in English to refer to a person in bondage or servitude in the
Bible, for instance. Most dictionaries only give one single meaning for this word,
the medieval, feudal sense, as the following one from the Cambridge Advanced
Learners Dictionary: ‘a member of a low social class in medieval times who worked
on the land and was the property of the person who owned that land’ (CALD).
As
we mentioned, the word serf was introduced into English from French at a
time when the practice of serfdom had all but disappeared from England. During
the time of the practice the primary words for a serf in Anglo-Latin were nativus,
villanus, or servus, and in Middle English, bond(e). The
word bond(e) meant ‘serf, tenant farmer, slave’, and it comes from Old
English bonda ‘householder’, which was either a native English word or
else it came from an Old Norse cognate bondi or boandi ‘free-born
farmer’, a noun derived by conversion from the identical present participle of the
verb boa ‘to dwell’. An extended term for a male serf was bondman
and for a female one, bondwoman. These words are now obsolete with those
meanings, but one compound that has survived is bondservant, a
combination of bond and servant created in the 16th century to translate
words for ‘slave’ in the English translation of the Bible (see below).
From
the word serf, English derived the word serfdom by means of the suffix
‑dom to name the practice, whose legal underpinnings as we said go back to
the Roman emperor Constantine in 332. As we will see below, the Spanish equivalent
of Eng. serfdom is servidumbre, which is also a possible translation
of Eng. slavery. The word serfdom, however, is not attested until
the middle of the 19th century (OED), when it replaced an earlier coinage made
with the suffix ‑age, serfage, in the previous century. The Britannica
Encyclopedia describes the practice of serfdom as follows:
condition
in medieval Europe in which a tenant farmer was bound to a hereditary plot of land
and to the will of his landlord. The vast majority of serfs in medieval Europe obtained
their subsistence by cultivating a plot of land that was owned by a lord. This was
the essential feature differentiating serfs from slaves, who were bought and sold
without reference to a plot of land. The serf provided his own food and clothing
from his own productive efforts. A substantial proportion of the grain the serf
grew on his holding had to be given to his lord…
The essential additional mark of serfdom was the lack of many
of the personal liberties that were held by freedmen. Chief among these was the
serf’s lack of freedom of movement; he could not permanently leave his holding or
his village without his lord’s permission. Neither could the serf marry, change
his occupation, or dispose of his property without his lord’s permission. He was
bound to his designated plot of land and could be transferred along with that land
to a new lord. Serfs were often harshly treated and had little legal redress against
the actions of their lords. A serf could become a freedman only through manumission,
enfranchisement, or escape.[v]
As
we saw before, the word sĕrvus was common in the Latin Bible,
which was the only version of the Bible available in Western Europe in the
Middle Ages. The official translation of the Bible into Latin that the Western European
(Catholic) Christian Church in use until the 16th century (before the rise of
Protestant Christian groups) used the word sĕrvus to translate the words for ‘slave’
in the original Biblical books written in Hebrew and Greek, primarily Hebrew עֶבֶד (‘éved) and Ancient Greek δοῦλος (doûlos).[4] When
the Bible was translated into the modern languages in the 16th century, Spanish
translations used the word siervo, the descendant of Lat. sĕrvus, and English translations typically
used the word servant, a loanword from French (see below). To this day, however,
there is controversy as to how to best translate these terms from the Bible. The
ESV (English Standard Version) Translation Oversight Committee met in the summer
of 2010 to discuss how to best translate these two Hebrew and Greek terms and the
following is part of the resolution they came up with:[vi]
A particular
difficulty is presented when words in biblical Hebrew and Greek refer to ancient
practices and institutions that do not correspond directly to those in the modern
world. Such is the case in the translation of ‘ebed (Hebrew) and doulos
(Greek), terms which are often rendered “slave.” These terms, however, actually
cover a range of relationships that require a range of renderings—either “slave,”
“bondservant,” or “servant”—depending on the context. Further, the word “slave”
currently carries associations with the often brutal and dehumanizing institution
of slavery in nineteenth-century America. For this reason, the ESV translation of
the words ‘ebed and doulos has been undertaken with particular attention
to their meaning in each specific context. Thus in Old Testament times, one might
enter slavery either voluntarily (e.g., to escape poverty or to pay off a debt)
or involuntarily (e.g., by birth, by being captured in battle, or by judicial sentence).
Protection for all in servitude in ancient Israel was provided by the Mosaic Law.
In New Testament times, a doulos is often best described as a “bondservant”—that
is, as someone bound to serve his master for a specific (usually lengthy) period
of time, but also as someone who might nevertheless own property, achieve social
advancement, and even be released or purchase his freedom. The ESV usage thus seeks
to express the nuance of meaning in each context. Where absolute ownership by a
master is in view (as in Romans 6), “slave” is used; where a more limited form of
servitude is in view, “bondservant” is used (as in 1 Corinthians 7:21-24); where
the context indicates a wide range of freedom (as in John 4:51), “servant” is preferred.
Footnotes are generally provided to identify the Hebrew or Greek and the range of
meaning that these terms may carry in each case.
As we
can see here, these modern-day translators of the Bible use three terms to translate
the traditional Ancient Greek and Hebrew terms for ‘slave’, depending on the type
of slavery they think is meant: slave, bondservant, and servant.
One unmentioned problem that these translators probably have with using just one
term, slave, is the negative connotations that this word has today and the
fear that people will see too clearly that the Bible approves of slavery. That is
why a term like servant that does not have the meaning that the person in
question is owned by another, is often preferred to refer to servitude (slavery)
that was presumably ‘voluntary’, although how voluntary it was is quite questionable,
or not as cruel as modern slavery was in the Americas, which is the type of
slavery most modern people are familiar with. The same thing is true of the term
bondservant which is according to these ‘experts’ the best way to translate
the Ancient Greek word for a ‘slave’ who might have some rights and whose term of
servitude is not necessarily their full natural life.
The question
of how to translate the words in the Bible that mean ‘slave’ is not new and the
solutions have varied over time. The early 17th century King James version of the
Old Testament used the word slave only once for all the about 800 instances
of the word for ‘slave’ in Hebrew. In the translation of the New Testament, the
word slave is used in only a few of all the instances of the word for ‘slave’
in Greek, namely doulos, even though this word only means ‘slave’ and not
anything else like ‘servant’, ‘hired hand’, ‘helper’ or anything like that, as the
King James translation would have us believe. There have been dozens of English
translations of the New Testament since the King James version of 1611 and very
few have consistently or even mostly translated Ancient Greek doulos into
English as slave. A major reason for this has been said to be the stigma
associated with slavery in the 17th century, for the images the word slave
evokes in modern times, such as people in chains, are not the same as those ancient
people had about slaves, since, after all, the Jewish people were themselves slaves
in Egypt, for example. Related to this is the fact that in the 17th century, slavery
was a brutish and racist institution that dehumanized the slave in ways that were
different from the normalcy with which slaves were seen in ancient times (even
if they weren’t always treated much better). There is also the fact that modern
Bible translators for the most part were not translating from the original ancient
Greek, but from its Latin translation, which was sĕrvus, and it may have felt natural
to translate this word as servant, a cognate word, even though the meaning
was not the same. After all, as we will see below, the main meaning of the word
servant in English is ‘one who is privately employed to perform domestic
services’ (AHD).
The issue
of slavery and its use as a metaphor of the relationship of Christians to Christ
is pervasive in the New Testament, but readers of most English translations cannot
see it as could readers of the original. There is plenty of evidence that early
Christians saw themselves as slaves, not just mere servants, of Christ. The Ancient
Greek word κύριος (kyrios) that meant ‘lord, master,
guardian, ruler, owner’ and even ‘slave owner/master’, is the word used in the original
New Testament Koiné Greek to refer to Jesus Christ. This was translated into Latin
as domĭnus,
which had an equivalent meaning, namely ‘the master of a house, head of the
household, lord, master’ (Cassell), and was derived from the root of the word domus
‘house’ (Lat. domĭnus
is the source of Sp. don, and the feminine Lat. domĭna is the source of Sp. doña).
Lat. domĭnus
was later translated into English as lord and into Spanish as señor (cf.
Part II, Chapter XX). This master-slave relationship of Christians to God was
not new to Christianity, however, for in the Old Testament (the Jewish Bible), the
Jews were also considered to be slaves of the Lord God, as when God is said to have
told Moses: ‘The Israelites are My slaves whom I brought out of the land of Egypt’
(Lev 25:55).
In the
preceding section we mentioned that the greeting ciao derived in a variety
of Latin from a very particular use of the word for ‘slave’, namely schiavo.
It seems that the usage of this word in this particular way may have had a precedent
in European languages in the Middle Ages, one that persists today in some varieties
of these languages. In central European languages that were at one time part of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, variants of the word sĕrvus came to be used as a greeting
or parting word, much like ciao did in Venetian. Thus, we have German Servus,
Slovak Servus; Slovene, Serbian and Croatian Serbus or Servus
(in Cyrillic: Сербус or Сервус), Hungarian Szervusz (often shortened to szevasz,
szeva, szia, or szió), Polish Serwus, Austrian German
Servus or Seavas, Romanian Servus, Slovene: Serbus/Servus,
Czech Servus, and Ukrainian Сервус (Servus). The use of this word as a
greeting is more popular or widespread in some countries than others, and even
in some regions of some countries than others.[vii] It
is thought that this use of the Latin word sĕrvus in these languages stems from
an ellipsis of the Latin expression servus humillimus, that meant ‘(your/I
am) most humble servant’, to which the phrase domine spectabilis ‘noble lord’
could be added. The word may have arisen as an extremely polite formula, though
there was probably an element of facetiousness involved in its becoming a common
expression.
[1] The
original says: ‘m. y f.
Persona que sirve a Dios y guarda sus preceptos’ (DLE).
[2] The DLE
defines this phrase thus: ‘siervo de la pena. m. El que para siempre era
condenado en juicio a servir en las minas u otras obras públicas’ (DLE).
[3] The
original says: ‘Der. Esclavo afecto a una heredad
y que no se desligaba de ella al cambiar de dueño.’ (DEL). The word gleba
is a rare term today that basically means ‘cultivated land’ or ‘fields’. It
comes from Lat. glēba, earlier glaeba, that meant ‘a small piece or
lump of earth, a clod’ and, by extension, ‘land, soil’, just like its Spanish
descendant gleba, which is a 15th century loan from Latin.
[4] Hebrew
of עֶבֶד (‘éved)
is a masculine noun. In Biblical Hebrew, there are also two other terms for
‘slave’ that are used only for female slaves, אָמָה
(‘amá), the female counterpart of עֶבֶד (‘éved),
and שִׁפְחָה (šip̄ḥā)
‘maidservant’. According to a recent study by Edward J. Bridge, ‘אָמָה predominates in legislation
and marriage contexts; and שִׁפְחָה
predominates in Genesis and when generally designating female slaves’, cf. Bridge,
E. J. (2012). Female slave vs female slave: המאand
החפש in the Hebrew Bible.
Journal of Hebrew scriptures, 12, 1-22. [2]. https://doi.org/10.5508/jhs.2012.v12.a2
(retrieved on 2020.11.18). Some have argued, however, that shifcha refers
to a non-Jewish female slave, whereas amah refers to a Jewish female slave.
Although this may be true in some contexts, matters seem to be quite a bit more
complicated, cf. https://ohr.edu/8234.
[iv] Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#Dates_of_emancipation_from_serfdom_in_various_countries
[v] Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/serfdom
(2020.11.18)
[vi] Source: http://static.crossway.org/excerpt/bibles/esv2011preface.pdf
(2020.11.18). For a very interesting condensed video version of the
deliberations, see ESV Bible Translators Debate the word “slave” at Tyndale House,
Cambridge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx06mtApu8k
(2020.11.18).
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