garden, yard, garth, girdle and court. Also cognate but less closely related are Latin hortus, a garden, and its English descendants horticulture and orchard. In Hungarian, kert, the word for a garden, literally means encircled. Because Hungarian is a Uralic rather than an Indo-European language, this is likely a loanword. Further afield, in ancient Iran, a fortified wooden settlement was called a gerd, or certa, which also means garden (as in the suffix -certa in the names of various ancient Iranian cities; e.g., Hunoracerta). The Persian word evolved into jerd under later Arab influence. Burugerd or Borujerd is a city in the west of Iran. The Indian suffix -garh, meaning a fort in Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, and other Indo-Iranian languages, appears in many Indian place names. Given that both Slavic and Indo-Iranian are sub-branches of Indo-European and that there are numerous similarities between Slavic and Sanskrit vocabulary, it is plausible that garh and gord are related. However, this is strongly contradicted by the phoneme /g/ in Indo-Iranian, which cannot be a reflex of the Indo-European palatovelar /*ǵ/. Construction A typical gord was a group of wooden houses built either in rows or in circles, surrounded by one or more rings of walls made of earth and wood, a palisade, and/or moats. Some gords were ring-shaped, with a round, oval, or occasionally polygonal fence or wall surrounding a hollow. Others, built on a natural hill or a man-made mound, were cone-shaped. Those with a natural defense on one side, such as a river or lake, were usually horseshoe-shaped. Most gords were built in densely populated areas on sites that offered particular natural advantages. As Slavic tribes united to form states, gords were also built for defensive purposes in less-populated border areas. Gords in which rulers resided or that lay on trade routes quickly expanded. Near the gord, or below it in elevation, there formed small communities of servants, merchants, artisans, and others who served the higher-ranked inhabitants of the gord. Each such community was known as a suburbium (). Its residents could shelter within the walls of the gord in the event of danger. Eventually the suburbium acquired its own fence or wall. In the High Middle Ages, the gord usually evolved into a castle, citadel or kremlin, and the suburbium into a town. Some gords did not stand the test of time and were abandoned or destroyed, gradually turning into