PYCCKOE B/HA

[E. Wayles Browne]

Danko Sipka offers a carefully worked out and detailed algorithm
for choosing u or na:

>Serbo-Croatian usage can be described as follows.
>
>                           u/na (spatial and pseudospacial)
>                            |
>                            |
>                   ----------------------------------
>                 place                     institution/situation
>                   |                                 |
>                   |                                 |
>            --------------                   ----------------
>        open              enclosed       regular         exception
>         |
>         |                U              NA              U
>         |                  ku}i           poslu          {etnji
>    -----------             manastiru      Fakultetu      {koli
> regular     exception      sobi           Katedri        ...
>                            dvorani        misi
> NA            U            crkvi          predstavi
>   trgu         parku       zgradi         ...
>   ulici        gradu       ...
>   stadionu     ...
>   livadi
>   predgra|u
>   selu
>   ...
>
...
>Using narrative convention, and including historical or foreign
>language influence date, one could speculate on the fact that some
>places are perceived differently from the other, like 'grad' (city)
>is perceived more as enclosed than 'selo' village, or 'park' (park),
>particularly the French one is perceived as closed object...
I wonder about one point. As I understand it, na selu (like the Polish
na wsi) means 'out in the countryside' (the opposite of 'in the city'),
whereas u selu (Polish we wsi) means 'in a/the village'. So the branch
with u gradu doesn't seem like an exception. There should be a branch
labelled 'inhabited places' including grad, selo, kolonija,
zemlja 'a country', drz^ava 'a state', as well as such concrete items as
Vars^ava, Sarajevo, S^estine, Slovenija, Vorarlberg, Arizona...
and then a branch for exceptions, such as Rijeka (takes na or u),
Florida (takes na), etc.

Wayles Browne, Assoc. Prof. of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics
Morrill Hall, Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A.
tel. 607-255-0712 (o), 607-273-3009 (h)
fax 607-255-2044 (write FOR W. BROWNE)
e-mail ewb2 at cornell.edu