You might be confused because, while Asimov did not coin the word “robot” (it was widely used in its modern, mechanical sense when he started writing), he did coin the word “robotics”, meaning the field of technology of robots.
Indeed, by the time Asimov started robots were a clichéd element in SF.
That sounds about right.
Čapek (the pronunciation of his name has varied over time as well, with something like Chop-ek replacing Sha-pek) provided a necessary epithet for the created artificial humanoid being. In the earlier clockwork days they were called automatons but that changed to mechanical men by the 20th century. (Asimov’s company was U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men.) Robot was so short and snappy that it went instantly into use not just for humanoid machines but any machine that performed rapid mechanical work seemingly on its own. Most of the early mentions of robot had little to no description of how they were formed. In R.U.R. they basically just come out of the oven fully formed, with no greater depth of information than in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.
The mechanical aspect was sealed in the public mind in 1927 when Westinghouse introduced Televox, a robot controlled by send sound down telephone wires. A huge national publicity campaign followed, swamping any thought of a European art play. Many other robots got publicity in national and international tours from then through the 1930s.
Those are the robots Asimov grew up with. His name doesn’t appear in my book Robots in American Popular Culture until page 95. He is a dominating figure today, but he wasn’t back then. I’m not sure there’s anything about robots that he invented except the word robotics. Somebody even wrote down three laws of robotics before John Campbell invented them.
Well, Asimov also coined the term “positronic”, but that’s mostly only associated with robots in Asimov’s own works (and for Data on Star Trek).
Cite that he wasn’t the (or a) creator of the Three Laws, though? I had understood that they arose from a conversation between him and someone else, so he wouldn’t get sole credit, but he would still get shared credit.
Asimov gave credit to John Campbell; John Campbell said the laws were implicit in the stories that Asimov wrote before the laws were written down.
I cover it in my Gnome Press bibliography in the I, Robot entry.
Asimov had dropped robots as a subject after the initial rejection, but the story’s publication got him thinking again. In late 1940 he wrote two puzzle tales starring the U.S. Robotics and Mechanical Men troubleshooters Donovan and Powell, “Reason” and “Liar,” both of which were snatched up by Campbell. Always looking to build stories on top of stories to make series that kept readers coming back, Campbell noticed that “Strange Playfellow” had included a line about the First Law of Robotics, which makes it impossible for a robot to harm a human being. He told Asimov that implied three laws, since repeated infinitely often.
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Asimov codified these in his fourth robot story, “Runaround,” appearing in the April 1942 Astounding. Note that the contents of I, Robot shifts this story up to second, right after “Robbie,” making it appear as if the Three Laws had been intended all along. The entire timeline is further scrambled to group the Donovan and Powell stories followed by the Susan Calvin stories and ending with the Stephen Byerly stories, more proof that I, Robot is a collection of short stories rather than a novel.
(As a sidenote, Asimov got scooped as the inventor of three laws of robotics. Buried deep in the June 1941 issue of Fantastic Adventures lay “Sidney, the Screwloose Robot,” by William P. McGivern. These should-be immortal lines are spoken to Sidney: “You must be industrious, you must be efficient, you must be useful. Those are the three laws that are to govern your behavior.”)
Cool! I did not know that.
I forgot I had a whole separate article on Sydney on a different site.
And if anybody doubts my assignment of them to Campbell, I quoted Asimov from his In Memory Yet Green autobiography.
This is all true; the Wiktionary even has a sound clip. I would assume some Scottish accents as well. The point was, some English-speaking people.
My mother spoke all the Slavic languages to some degree, but she was actually a dialectologist of Czech, and it was her best language, albeit her first language was Slovak. She also had near-native fluency in Russian.
My mother could do “Henry Higgins” in Czech-- tell you where you grew up, where you were from originally, where you lived now, and whenand when you pareng
She wrote articles in Czech and Slovak, and lectured in both languages, could translate from one to the other, from either to English, English to either, as well as from Russian into either Czech or Slovak (or English, for that matter).
I can tell you a several things: 1) every word in Czech is stressed on the first syllable; 2) č is pronounced “ch,” as in the English word church. Sh, as in shoe is š; 3) Czech has only three diphthongs, one of which is not the vowel in “boat”-- it’s “ou” and pretty much sounds like the ou in flour and mouse. (The other two diphthongs are used solely in loan words.)
So, 4) the second vowel in “robot” is exactly like the first one, but people who are native speakers of English do not hear them the same. The same way we seem familiar patterns in what we see, and see Jesus in burnt toast, we listen for patterns.
- The Czech pronunciation of “robot” is
['rɔbɔt]
if you don’t speak IPA, digest version is this: first syllable stress; trilled r; vowel like a pure long O, as in knot or top; b pretty much like one in the US, knot/top again; a hard T, in other words, fully aspirated, unlike plosives in US English.
while “rowboat” in English (Northern US, the only one I can speak to) is
[ˈɹoʊˌboʊt̚]
stressed first syllable; untrilled upsides R; dipthong “aohw”; minor stress that prevents the second vowel from being a schwa; b that we have in common; another dipthong “aohw”; and finally, a T the is not plosive. The tongue gets in position, but doesn’t complete the plosion, so it is called a “soft” T.
BUT
People look for patterns. Foreign accents happen because you are not exactly saying the word in the new language. You are saying the closest approximation you an hear in your native language. To a American, “rowboat” and “robot” are close enough. And since Czech does not have a word like “robot,” other than robot, it will be understood in context.
Or to use another example-- ventriloquists use a lot of word approximations, but if you are following the dialogue just fine, your brain hears what it expects to hear, and the performance is a two-way street.
This explanation is confusing to me. First, /ɔ/ does not appear in the words knot or top, at least in my dialect (Midwestern American). Those words have the COT vowel /ɒ/ or /ɑ/, while /ɔ/ is the CAUGHT vowel that appears in naughty and taught. And neither of those vowels is what I understand to be the “long O”, which is the /oʊ/ that appears in tote and goat.
So is the first syllable in the Czech pronunciation like “raw” or like “rot” or like “row”? Based on the IPA you gave, I would expect “raw”.
My grandfather (born 1906 in Ireland) also pronounced the word without the final t, to rhyme with hobo. Thanks for reminding me - I hadn’t thought of that for nearly 50 years.
It would be interesting to know the story of this silent-t pronunciation that seems to have existed in Britain and Ireland at some point in the 20th century.
Maybe from some misguided idea that the word was French?
Yes, based on your description of how the sounds in cot and caught are realised in your accent.
In my accent, it would correspond to the vowel in “rot”.
From Czech phonology - Wikipedia
The phonemes /o/ and /oː/ are sometimes transcribed /ɔ/ and /ɔː/. This transcription describes the pronunciation in Central Bohemia and Prague, which is more open. The standard pronunciation is something between [o(ː)] and [ɔ(ː)], i.e. mid back vowel.
So based on this, the phonetic transcription ['rɔbɔt] is characteristic of Prague pronunciation.
Not necessarily misguided - that is how the word is pronounced in French, and it could be that the French word was introduced by means of some cultural influence in a particular region and time, to spreakers who were not previously familiar.
And even in American English, “robo” is still found in compounds.
Murray from the Goldbergs says “robut”, I think there was an episode where he and Adam go back and forth pronouncing.
Brian
Cory Doctorow wrote a satiric piece of Asimoviana as a story titled “I, Rowboat”, published in - I’m not kidding - Flurb: A Webzine of Astonishing Tales. The title, but nothing else, was a twist on a very good serious story of his called “I, Robot” that was nominated for a Hugo.
Runners-up include Joel David Neff’s “AI, Robot,” Sue Lange’s “We, Robots,” and Konstantine Paradias’ “Oi, Robot.”