Ricerc@Sapienza

The paper deals with the long history of the word robot and related
terms throughout the European languages. Robot, a word invented
by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, nowadays is at the very heart of
the Western imagery, both in movies and literary creations, since the
first Asimov stories published during the forties of the past century.
The modern fictional and technological scenarios describe many
types of robots, thus spreading many new nouns. This is also a history
of dreams and nightmares, of machines conceived and created by
Greeks, Arabs, Europeans: a history which sheds light on the peculiar
semantic values of words like Greek autómata, Hebrew gôlem and so
forth.