DEAR ROBOT, WHO ARE YOU? OR WHAT ARE YOU?: ENGLISH IN ROBOTICS

Not many plays introduce a new word to the language. One that did was Karel Čapek’s RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots that had its premiere in Prague 100 years ago. Every time we use the word ‘robot’ to denote a humanoid machine, it derives from Čapek’s play, which coined the term from the Czech “robota” meaning forced labour.

A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer— capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. And as it a machine then according to common rules of English grammar we should speak about it as ‘it’, ‘what’ or ‘something’. But in his play Karel Čapek described his robots as ‘he’ and ‘she’. Was it just a creative idea of the author? A robot is ‘what’ or ‘who’?