@Richard_ermen It's their own name for themselves. "The Slavic autonym is reconstructed in Proto-Slavic as *Slověninъ, plural *Slověne. The oldest documents written in Old Church Slavonic and dating from the 9th century attest the autonym as Slověne (Словѣне)."

@thor *thumbs_up* Learn something new every day =)

@Richard_ermen I assume that's also the origin of Slovenia and Czechoslovakia, then.

@Richard_ermen More from Wikipedia: The reconstructed autonym *Slověninъ is usually considered a derivation from slovo ("word"), originally denoting "people who speak (the same language)," i.e. people who understand each other, in contrast to the Slavic word denoting German people – němci, meaning "silent, mute people" (from Slavic *němъ – "mute, mumbling").

@thor Slovenia I can follow, Czechslovakia, well at least for Slovakia, the Czech are what remained after the Magyar movement into the hungarian terrain, right? After all, Czechs are sorta eastern-germanic sorted after their arrival during the great movements of the early 4th century?

@pskosinski To be more specific and accurate, Moors kept Eastern European slaves in Spain. Slaves were kept elsewhere too, but the word stuck. I'm not pulling that out my ass. That's what historians and etymologists believe is the origin of the word. Sorry for not providing enough detail for you.

@xrevan86 @pskosinski Sigh. Read a little about etymology before you speak up. The word "slave" in a number of other languages OTHER than the slavic languages themselves is borrowed FROM the Slavic word "slav". Of COURSE Slavs wouldn't use the word for their own people to mean "slave". If you look at the histories of words (etymologies), you find these kinds of borrowings and distorted meanings literally everywhere.

@xrevan86 For the same reason we call those peoples the Slavs.

See: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=slav

See: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=slave (3rd entry from the top)

@xrevan86 Also see Norwegian dictionary: http://ordbok.uib.no/perl/ordbok.cgi?OPP=+slave&ant_bokmaal=5&ant_nynorsk=5&bokmaal=+&ordbok=begge

The note in the parenthesis in the first paragraph says: (same origin as "slaves", actually about Slavic prisoners of war sold as thralls)

@xrevan86 Individual phonemes, like O and A in this case, are very prone to shifts over time and across languages. It also happens to consonants. For example, "Farbe" (German), "farve" (Danish), "färg" (Swedish) and "farge" (Norwegian), all meaning "color".

@xrevan86 Another example would be "fenestra" (Latin), "fönster" (Swedish) and "Fenster" (German), all meaning "window". They all clearly took it from Latin. Something else happened with "window" (English), "vindu" (Danish/Norwegian) and "vindauge" (older Norwegian); they kept the old Germanic word, roughly "wind-eye" if decompose the word into its constituent parts.

@thor this is a design flaw. there should be something that indicates a larger conversation.

@jd Even Twitter is a bit flawed there. Honestly, the whole conversation should be visible when clicking a link. Spoke about this to @eurasierboy and he says they need to change the API first. I created a ticket for it, which has received medium priority:

@thor @eurasierboy yeah, I was also going to say Twitter has exactly the same problem. Also, comments seem to branch off separately here in unclear ways. Still learning this myself.

@thor @jd I've somewhat made a concession to this in the latest version, allowing folks to opt into drilling further into the context of a conversation. It's just not automated.

@eurasierboy @thor I wish i could see an example of what you say

@jd @thor you an Amaroq user? :P select this comment and you'll see just this string of replies as the context. If you scroll up to the original post and tap that, it'll take you to the context of that post, which has all of the redundant replies 😂

@eurasierboy @thor Amaroq? nope.

@jd @thor I'd try to take screenshots to demonstrate it but it's rather difficult to show even then, sorry 😥