In an article in the Czech journal "Lidové noviny" in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures "laboři" ("workers", from Latin "labor"). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested "roboti". The word "robota" means literally "corvée", "serf labor", and figuratively "drudgery" or "hard work" in Czech and also (more general) "work", "labor" in many Slavic languages (e.g.: Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Polish, Macedonian, Ukrainian, archaic Czech, as well as "robot" in Hungarian). Traditionally the "robota" (Hungarian "robot") was the work period a serf (corvée) had to give for his lord, typically 6 months of the year. The origin of the word is the Old Church Slavonic (Old Bulgarian) "rabota" "servitude" ("work" in contemporary Bulgarian and Russian), which in turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European root "*orbh-". "Robot" is cognate with the German root "Arbeit" (work).