Some comments on the origin of homonymy in the Slavic languages

In this paper we shall focus our attention. on several aspects of the ongm and nature of homonymy, drawing examples from Russian and Serbo-Croatian and other Slavic languages. We shall first view this from a diachronic perspective noting some of the reasons for the appearance of homonyms. Then we shall examine the phenomenon at the synchronic level employing a variant of Serbo-Croatian in which important phonetic changes now in pro­ cess have given rise to new homophones. We may begin by turning to the ancestor of both Russian and Serbo-Croatian, Common Slavic. Homonymy appears to be a linguistically universal phenomenon, and it is safe to assu­ me that there were homonyms in Common Slavic. One pair of such words was undoubtedly the infinitive pasti 'to graze' (pasq) and ' to fall' (padq) which has its reflexes in most of the modern Slavic languages, e. g. Serbo-Croatian pásti and pȁsti or Russian pastí and past' and Ukrainian pásty

Croatian · Focus (optics) · Homophone · Infinitive · Linguistics · Phenomenon · Physics · Serbian · Slavic languages · Verb · History · Language and Culture · Linguistics and language evolution · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Philosophy