alt Hacker News"Slav" deriving from the Slavic term for "word" is something of a false etymology that was invented in the 19th century. It is implausible on philological grounds: you'd expect a different vowel in this word if this were the case, and the suffix *-ninъ is only otherwise used in terms derived from place names.
It is more likely[0] that the term derives from some toponym. This is in line with how tribal names tend to work in Europe and is not problematic in terms of historical linguistics, however it gives less fuel to romantic nationalism and armchair speculations about national "identities" or "mindsets".
-----
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/s...
Replies
The irony for me being that when I was first learning Polish and looking for any and all mnemonics - “ah, that word is the number nine, and that one is ten because it has an s in the middle and that’s next to t for ten in the alphabet”-levels of desperate - the false etymology helped me set word, słowo, in my head, and the rather delightful dosłownie, literally / to the word, has remained ever since.
(tho while on the subject, it’s hard to beat wieloryb as a wonder that I don’t want to know the true etymology of ever because if there’s even a chance that the word for whale derived from the words great as-in-size + fish, I want to hang on to it forever)
False etymology? You can roll back sound changes further to *ḱlew- in Proto-Indo-European
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
I always thought it was probable that it came from the same root as the word for "glory" - слава - as in, we're the glorious people.
Dunno. A nice parallel fact is that the word for "Germans" in at least a few Slavic languages literally means "mutes" - the ones who don't speak.
So you'd have the Slavs - the people of word - and the Germans - the mutes.