philena (philena) wrote in linguaphiles,
philena
philena
linguaphiles

"City" in slavic languages

Hello. I'm writing a homework assignment in which I would like to give examples of cognates between related languages*. I was hoping to do a short list of variations of the word "city" in Slavic. I know that Russian "city" is город, and I understand that South Slavic "city" is some variant on град, but I would like the correct spellings and pronunciations for all Slavic languages. I am particularly interested in the words that are related to [grad/gorod]. If there is a Slavic language that has adopted another word to mean "city", then what does is its reflex of proto-Slavic 'grad,' and what does it now mean?

Thank you.


*Note: this is not my homework assignment. I am not asking you to do my homework for me. My actual assignment is to look at VPs who take various CP complements and discuss their feature matrices within the Minimalism framework. What I am hoping to do is add a [Phon:value] categorial feature to the feature matrix so that I can say that certain lexical items do not have a [uC] or a [uN] or a [uP] selectional feature, but can also have a [uPhon:value] selectional feature. This would allow us to account for the fact that you can only say rely on. If you maintain that rely has a [uP] feature, there is no way to rule out incorrect constructions such as *rely to. If you allow rely to have a [uPhon:on] feature, then it would select only the correct preposition on . The problem with this claim is that one of the tenets of Minimalism is that the set of all features are common to all languages, and the differences in grammars can be explained by the different combinations of these features that are bundled into lexical items. If we start giving words phonetic value features, suddenly those features are not common to all languages anymore. What I hope to do with my list of cognates is show that, in fact, those features are common to related languages, and are simply realized differently in the pronunciation because the languages have different phonological systems. This is probably not a sustainable claim, but it works for the purposes of my homework, and it's only a footnote anyway.
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