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Hi, everyone. And welcome back to 【It Means What? 】

Yeah.

Thank you, 安澜. Every time. 欢迎大家回到我们的新板块【词源考古研究所】.
Hi, 安澜.

Hi, Lulu. Hi, everyone.

So 安澜, if I ask you about the hottest topic in the world of technology, what do you think it would be?

Well.

Two letters.

It is gotta be AI.

Yes.

And to talk about AI就说到人工智能的话, of course, we need to talk about robots.

Yes.

机器人. I know a lot of you probably have trouble pronouncing that word, although it's very easy, but I've heard many mispronunciations.

So for American pronunciation, you would pronounce it Robot [ˈroʊˌbɑt], and British pronunciation?

We will say robot [ˈrəʊbɒt].

Roughly the same.

Yeah, but it doesn't really matter, because it's not an English word anyway.

Oh. Is it not?

Nope. It actually comes from Czech.

就是捷克, 捷克语. Was it also robot in Czech?

In Czech, it’s - there's a word “robota”.

Robota, let me guess, this gotta be a word related to machine, automation, technological advances, all of those fancy things.

No, it means forced labor, slave or serf.

What?

That's what it means.

Okay. Forced labor, 强制劳动, slave奴隶

Yeah.

Serf我记得的话s-e-r-f对吧?

Yeah. That's right.

是农奴的意思.

Yeah. That's what it means.

By the way, what is the difference between a serf and a slave?

Well. Serfs were like slaves, as they were forced to stay on the land where they lived. But serfs were part of the land. If they were sold, it's normally with land.

And they had some rights.

Yeah, they have some very basic rights.

But they had to pay for every one of those rights, if I remembered correctly.