The Slavic ethnonym, Slavs, is reconstructed in Proto-Slavic as *Slověninъ, plural Slověně. The earliest written references to the Slav ethnonym are in other languages.
Early mentions
Sporoi or Spori was according to Eastern Roman scholar Procopius the old name of the Antes and Sclaveni, two Early Slavic branches. Procopius stated that the Sclaveni and Antes spoke the same language, but he did not trace their common origin back to the Veneti but to a people he called Sporoi. He derived the name from Greek σπείρω, because "they populated the land with scattered settlements". He described their society as democratic, and their language as barbaric. Roman bureaucrat Jordanes wrote about the Slavs in his work Getica : "although they derive from one nation, now they are known under three names, the Veneti, Antes and Sclaveni" ; that is, the West Slavs, East Slavs, and South Slavs. He stated that the Veneti were the ancestors of the Sclaveni and the Antes, the two having used to be called Veneti but are now "chiefly" called Sclaveni and Antes. Jordanes' Veneti and Procopius' Sporoi were used for the ethnogenetic legend of the Slavs, the ancestors of the Slavs. Thus, the Slav ethnonym at first denoted the southern group of the early Slavs. This ethnonym is attested by Procopius in Byzantine Greek as Σκλάβοι, Σκλαβηνοί, Σκλαυηνοί, Σθλαβηνοί, or Σκλαβῖνοι, while his contemporary Jordanes refers to the Sclaveni in Latin. In Ancient Greek there are no words with the root sl-, thus the original ethnonym was transformed into skl-, as that root was present.
In East Church Slavonic manuscripts, the ethnonym is spelt Slověne, such as in the Primary Chronicle, Sofia First Chronicle, Novgorod First Chronicle and Novgorod Fourth Chronicle. In the source dating to 898 included in the Primary Chronicle, the term is used both for East Slavic tribes and more often for a people.
Etymology
The Slavic autonym*Slověninъ is usually considered a derivation from slovo "word", originally denoting "people who speak ", i. e. people who understand each other, in contrast to the Slavic word denoting "foreign people", namely němci, meaning "mumbling, murmuring people". The latter word may be the derivation of words to denote "Germans" or "Germanic peoples" in many later Slavic languages: e. g., Czech ', Slovak ', Slovene Nemec, Belarusian, Russian and Bulgarian ', Serbian ', Croatian ', Polish ', Ukrainian ', etc., but another theory states that rather these words are derived from the name of the Nemetes tribe, which is derived from the Celtic root nemeto-. The word slovo and the related slava and slukh originate from the Proto-Indo-European root , cognate with Ancient Greek κλέος, whence comes the name Pericles, Latin , and English. Alternative proposals for the etymology of *Slověninъ propounded by some scholars have much less support. B. Philip Lozinski argues that the word*slava once had the meaning of "worshipper", in this context "practicer of a common Slavic religion", and from that evolved into an ethnonym. S. B. Bernstein speculated that it derives from a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European', cognate to Ancient Greek "population, people", which itself has no commonly accepted etymology. Meanwhile, others theorize that Slavyane is of toponymic origin, from a place named Slovo or a river named Slova; this, according to some, is implied by the suffix -enin. The Old East SlavicSlavuta for the Dnieper River was argued by Henrich Bartek to be derived from slova and also the origin of Slověne. The English term slave derives from the ethnonym Slav. In medieval wars many Slavs were captured and enslaved, which led to the word slav becoming synonym to "enslaved person". In addition, the English word Slav derives from the Middle English word sclave, which was borrowed from Medieval Latin or slavus, itself a borrowing and Byzantine Greek σκλάβος sklábos "slave," which was in turn apparently derived from a misunderstanding of the Slavic autonym. The Byzantine term Sklavinoi was loaned into Arabic as Saqaliba by medieval Arab historiographers. However, the origin of this word is disputed. The popular Italian-language salutation Ciao is derived from the word.
