Russian rules, Czech geography

[Martin Votruba]

[Sorry if this shows up as a duplicate, the first post failed to register in
my sent mail.]

> Now what if the Slavic place name were a cognate of a Russian
> word like "selo" - for me this is purely hypothetical as no

It would probably be declined, Francoise.  (The Russian rule about not
declining foreign names ending in -o has not developed spontaneously in the
spoken language, cognates or not).  Such a full cognate could be Borovno --
a Czech village, and a Russian village and lake.  It would hardly occur to a
native speaker not to decline it should they make a reference to the quite
obscure Czech place -- the rule would have to be imposed by an editor or
someone like that.

You can find, for instance, the Czech version (Kladsko) of the Polish place
name Klodzko declined in Russian:

www.brocgaus.ru/text/006/381.htm

... and the Czech place name Blatno (scroll down the page):

http://stasdm.onego.ru/phillumeny/labels/czech/page1/page1_r.html

There are also instances of such Polish place names used with the locative
ending in Russian.


Martin

votruba "at" pitt "dot" edu

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