Thread: Novel "Град обреченный"

Just bought this novel written by Strugatsky brothers, but one thing is bugging me. English translation is "The Doomed City". So why then the title is not "ГОРОД обреченный" but ГРАД (which mean something else).

I manage to find that this is some sort of old russian word for city.. i hope that there is no more those old words in the book otherwise i will not know the difference. Has anyone read it ?

Yeah that kind of difference is common when you backtrack a few hundred ish years. Russian went down a track in which they added o's in kooky consonant clusters.
Compared to polish:
молоко - młoko
золото - złoto

It gets really strange when Russian starts stressing the placeholder-support vowel, like город.

o and e are generally the vowel-bolsterers for Russian. сердце from Old East Slavonic сьрдьце

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic..._and_pleophony
[I explained that sort of backwards actually, the correct explanation is complicated and laid out here]

Regardless, град is still a word, and has split from it's now brother word город
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B...%D0%B4#Russian

According to public lecture of russian linguist Anrej Zaliznjak there were process of melting of old-church-slavic with old-russian which resulted in modern russian (language of Pushkin). It's very simplified description, but anyway. Old-church-slavic was old-bulgarian in it's core and it entered to Russia as a translation of Bible. It was "high" and "bookish" dialect, but it influenced a lot modern russian.
Let's look at some examples from lecture, old-church-slavic style vs old-russian style (with modern meanings, old meanings were the same):

глава (leader, chief) - голова (head of man or animal)
страна (country) - сторона (side)
страж (guardian) - сторож (keeper)
град (city) - город (city)

As you can note old-church-slavic-styled words sill exist, but their meaning is shifted to more "high-order" and "important" things (but note, that with exception of "град" they are usual, everyday-speech words).
This is true in some manner for "град" too. Despite of the same meaning with "город", word "град" has more "pompous" tone. "Град обреченный" has strong poetic intonation. It's good for something like "Thou shalt fall, doomed city!". We do not use "град" in everyday speech, so it tends to become outdated.

I understand... tnx to all.

So then ..i assume that this is only in the title because book is written in 70's.
Not long ago i received a comment when i used a word тотчас in writing, that is outdated. It's hard with those words for a non Russian speaker. I'm pretty sure that i read тотчас on some Russian online news site few weeks ago.

i assume that this is only in the title because book is written in 70's.

No. It's just about poetic intonation. It was "old" in 70's too.

I would not tell that тотчас is outdated. Bookish may be, but not outdated.

BTW, Until recently we had Ленинград and we still have Волгоград and some smaller cities ending with -град.

Originally Posted by Mig25

So then ..i assume that this is only in the title because book is written in 70's.

The name originates from an artwork by Nicholas Roerich which "astonished [the authors] a while ago with its gloomy beauty and the feeling of hopelessness radiating from it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doomed_City

http://grani.roerich.com/gallery/velint/gradobr.htm

Originally Posted by Mig25

I manage to find that this is some sort of old russian word for city..

Not Old Russian, but Old Church Slavonic.

In Old Russian, on the contrary, it’s always -оро-, -оло-, not -ра-, -ла-, -ре-, -ле-.
Old Russian is pleophonic like all other East Slavic Languages, while Old Church Slavonic being a South Slavic language is non-pleophonic.

In contemporary Russian, Old Russian forms and Church Slavonic ones are mixed together. During many centuries, Church Slavonic was a literary language in Russia, and Russian language borrowed a lot from it.

There are many Russian—Church-Slavonic doublet words in contemporary Russian.

Sometimes, the Church Slavonic word is a poetic variant of a Russian word:

Russian			Church Slavonic
го́род	(standard)		град	(poetic)
зо́лото	(standard)		зла́то	(poetic)
воро́та	(standard)		врата́	(poetic)

Sometimes, the way around:

Russian			Church Slavonic
во́рог	(poetic)		враг	(standard)
шело́м	(poetic)		шлем	(standard)

Sometimes, the two are synonyms, or words with close meanings, or even with completely different meanings:

Russian			Church Slavonic
рожа́ть	‘give birth’		рожда́ть	‘give birth, give rise, create’
горожа́нин	‘town/city dweller’		граждани́н	‘sitizen; sir’
голова́	‘head’		глава́	‘chief; chapter’
горя́чий	‘hot’		горя́щий	‘burning’
сторона́	‘side’		страна́	‘country’
по́рох	‘gunpowder’		прах	‘ashes, remains’
хорони́ть	‘bury’		храни́ть	‘keep, store’
нёбо	‘palate’		не́бо	‘sky’

Church Slavonic variants are used actively in word formation and calques due to their brevity even if the Church Slavonic word is not used by its own:

word with a Russian root			derivate with a Church Slavonic root
де́рево	‘tree; wood’		древе́сный	‘arboreal’
го́лос	‘voice’		гла́сность	‘publicity’
хо́лод	‘cold’		хладосто́йкий	‘cold-resistant’
молоко́	‘milk’		млекопита́ющее	‘mammal’