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The Chambers Twenty-first Century Dictionary gives the historical meaning of 'slave' as "someone owned by and acting as servant to another, with no personal freedom"1. Presumably, the description is meant to fit the Sumerian, the Greek, the Roman, the Jewish, the American and the Spanish slave. In fact, there is no word for slave in the Sumerian or the Hebrew languages. The Greek word for slave was "doulos" — the word erected a clear linguistic boundary between slaves and free men No such boundary existed in the East. In the Sumerian cuneiform sign for slave, the word means "a man from the mountains", that is, a captive from an alien land. This vagueness infects the Egyptian word 'b'k'. The Hebrew word 'ebed' denotes anyone from 'slave', 'servant of the lord' in the phrase 'ebed Jahwe' to 'ebed al malek', the servant of the king.2
There is as much history in the meaning of a word as there is culture. Contrast Justice Taney's famous observation that Negroes had "no rights which any white man was bound to respect" (March 6, 1857),3 with the fact that the Iberian slave had access to the courts. The Anglo-Saxon 'slave' was a thing, not a person. The Spanish slave was a person without liberty. The laws and customs relating to slavery were codified in centralised Portugal and Spain as early as 1263-5. The Las Siete Partidas del Roy Alfonso specifies the rights of a slave in detail. For instance: 'If married slaves owned by separate masters could not live together because of distance, the church should persuade one or the other to sell his slave. If neither of the masters could be persuaded, the church was to buy one of them so that the married slaves could live together'.4
What, then, of the antonym of 'slavery' — 'freedom'? The meaning of this word too must be inextricably connected to the historical experience of the people. Thus, freedom and democracy mean little in the Iberian world — Spain and Portugal were both dictatorships until the other day, and Latin America has the perpetual caudillo — whereas some form of participatory government and the associated idea of liberty persisted throughout Greek, Republican Roman and Western European history as the reflex of slavery and exclusion. Centralised, absolutist states are more 'free' than democratic, decentralised polities. Where you cannot lose your freedom, the concept cannot arise. And a strong, 'despotic' state precludes slavery for it would entail loyalty of slaves to private persons, rather than, as observed, to the 'despot'.
According to W. V. Quine, nothing can count as the unique meaning of a word or expression; meaning is indeterminate. Why? Because meaning is inextricably connected with behaviour, which in turn is connected to a world-view. Thus, words acquire meaning only in relation to their place in the language and the world-view. "...people feel drawn to a mentalistic account of language, despite the conspicuous fact that language is a social enterprise...."5 Thus we cannot translate the English words slave or free into other languages: the differing world-views, that is, historical experiences, would not permit such translation.
The same conclusion is reached via the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Wittgenstein's stress on the connection between linguistic activity and a 'way of life'.6
Notes:
1 'slave', The Chambers Twenty-first Century Dictionary (New Delhi: Allied Publishers (India) Ltd, 2000)
2 William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1955), p. 43
3 'Dred Scott decision', Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol.4, p. 218
4 Eric Dunning, 'Race Relations', in Geoffrey Hurd (ed.), Human Societies, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 158, 165 - 166
5 W.V. Quine, "Mind and Verbal Dispositions", Meaning and Reference, p. 81
6 'translation', A Dictionary Of Philosophy, ed. Antony Flew (London: Pan Books, 1979)
