Slavs (ethnonym)
The Slavic ethnonym (and autonym), "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/Byzantine scholar Procopius (500–560) 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 (as per Jordanes) but to a people he called "Sporoi". He derived the name from Greek ("I scatter grain"), 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" (551): "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" (though, by implication, not exclusively) called Sclaveni and Antes. Jordanes' "Veneti" and Procopius' "Sporoi" were used for the  ethnogenetic legend of the Slavs, the ancestors of the "Slavs" (the subsequent ethnic group name). Thus, the Slav ethnonym at first denoted the southern group of the early Slavs. This ethnonym is attested by Procopius in Byzantine Greek as ('), ('), ('), ('), 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 "sklērós", "hard"). Church Slavonic manuscripts. 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 (in the Kievan Rus' society, alongside Varangians, Chuds and Kriviches). Etymology. The Slavic 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 "foreign people", namely "němci", meaning "mumbling, murmuring people" (from Slavic "*němъ" "mumbling, mute"). The latter word may be the derivation of words  to denote "Germans" or "Germanic peoples" in many later Slavic languages, e. g., Czech "Němec", Slovak "Nemec", Slovene "Nemec", Belarusian, Russian and Bulgarian "Немец", Serbian "Немац", Croatian "Nijemac", Polish "Niemiec", Ukrainian "Німець", 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" ("word") and the related "slava" ("glory, fame, praise") and ("hearing") originate from the Proto-Indo-European root ("be spoken of, glory"), cognate with Ancient Greek ( "fame"), whence comes the name Pericles, Latin ("be called"), 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 λαός ("laós") "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 Slavic "Slavuta" for the Dnieper River was argued by Henrich Bartek (1907–1986) 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 "sclavus" or "slavus", itself a borrowing and Byzantine Greek "sklábos" "slave," which was in turn apparently derived from a misunderstanding of the Slavic autonym (denoting a speaker  of their own languages). The Byzantine term "Sklavinoi" was loaned into Arabic as "Saqaliba" (صقالبة; sing. "Saqlabi", صقلبي) by medieval Arab historiographers. However, the origin of this word is disputed. In 1995, for the first time, a version was expressed, according to which the Greek word "Σκλάβινοι" does not come from the self-name of the Slavs, but from the Greek verb σκυλεύο - "to extract spoils of war". According to this version, the self-name of the Slavs and their Modern Greek name coincided phonetically purely by chance. The popular Italian-language (and international) salutation "Ciao" is derived from the  word.