The Language

Georgian (ქართული ენა, kartuli ena) is the native language of the Georgians and the official language of Georgia.

Georgian is the primary language of about 3.9 million people in Georgia itself, and of another 500,000 abroad (chiefly in Turkey, Iran, Russia, the USA and Europe). It is the literary language for all regional subgroups of the Georgian ethnos, including those who speak other South Caucasian or Kartvelian languages: Svans, Mingrelians, and the Laz. Judaeo-Georgian, sometimes considered a separate Jewish language, is spoken by an additional 20,000 in Georgia and 65,000 elsewhere (primarily 60,000 in Israel).

Lenguas del Caucaso

Classification

Georgian is the most pervasive of the South Caucasian languages, a family that also includes Svan and Megrelian (chiefly spoken in Northwest Georgia) and Laz (chiefly spoken along the Black Sea coast of Turkey, from Melyat, Rize to the Georgian frontier).

Dialects

Dialects of Georgian include Imeretian, Racha-Lechkhumian, Gurian, Adjaran, Imerkhevian (in Turkey), Kartlian, Kakhetian, Ingilo (in Azerbaijan), Tush, Khevsur, Mokhevian, Pshavian, Fereydan dialect in Iran in Fereydunshahr and Fereydan, Mtiuletian, Meskhetian.

History

Georgian shared a common ancestral language with and is believed to have separated from Svan and Mingrelian/Laz in the first millennium BC. Based on the degree of change, linguists (e.g. Klimov, T. Gamkrelidze, G. Machavariani) conjecture that the earliest split occurred in the second millennium BC or earlier, separating Svan from the other languages. Megrelian and Laz separated from Georgian roughly a thousand years later.

The earliest allusion to spoken Georgian may be a passage of the Roman grammarian Marcus Cornelius Fronto in the 2nd century AD: Fronto imagines the Iberians addressing the emperor Marcus Aurelius in their incomprehensible tongue.

The evolution of Georgian into a written language was a consequence of the conversion of the Georgian elite to Christianity in the mid-4th century. The new literary language was constructed on an already well-established cultural infrastructure, appropriating the functions, conventions, and status of Aramaic, the literary language of pagan Georgia, and the new national religion. The first Georgian texts are inscriptions and palimpsests dating to the 5th century. Georgian has a rich literary tradition. The oldest surviving literary work in Georgian is the "Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik" (Tsamebay tsmindisa Shushanikisi, dedoplisa) by Iakob Tsurtaveli, from the 5th century AD. The Georgian national epic, "The Knight in the Panther's Skin" (Vepkhistqaosani), by Shota Rustaveli, dates from the 12th century.

The history of Georgian can conventionally be divided into:

Early Old Georgian: 5th-8th centuries
Classical Old Georgian: 9th-11th centuries
Middle Georgian: 12th-18th centuries
Modern Georgian: 18th-21st centuries

Alfabet

The Georgian alphabet is unique among the 14 alphabets of the world and currently has 33 letters. In the beginning there were more, but some letters have become obsolete. It is the only language in the Ibero-Caucasian family that has its own ancient writing and alphabet.

The oldest form of the Georgian alphabet, alphabet Asomtavruli ( "capital") was created in the 412 AC by Georgian priests of the cult of Matra (Mithra of Persia). The alphabet Asomtavruli underwent reform in the year 284 BC, carried out by the King Farnavaz I of Iberia.

Several Georgian historians believe that the Georgian alphabet was created in the third century BC and that its founder was the famous Georgian King Parnavaz.

Still preserved samples of the Asomtavruli alphabet, also known as Mrgvlovani ( "rounded"), can be found in monumental inscriptions, such as those found in the walls of the Bolnisi Sioni church south of Tbilisi (from 493 AC and considered the oldest inscription of Georgia). Even older samples were found, dating from the third century C. to the third century AC, Armaztsikhe (near Mtskheta) and Nekresi (in the region of Kakheti in eastern Georgia) in 1940 and from 1995 to 2003 in scientific expeditions conducted by Simon Janashia (1900-1947) and Levan Chilashvili. The inscriptions were studied by Pavle Armaztsikhe Ingorokva.

The earliest writing discovered, dating from 864 AD and preserved in the Monastery of St. Ekaterina in the Sinai Peninsula (Egypt).

Nuskhuri alphabets (lowercase) or Kutkhovani ( "box") appeared at first in the ninth century. Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri known as Khutsuri (ხუცური, or ecclesiastical writing "), were used to write religious manuscripts, using the Asomtavruli to write the letters.

The modern alphabet, called Mkhedruli (მხედრული, "secular" or "military writing"), first appeared in the eleventh century. It was used not for religious purposes until the eighteenth century, which was later completely replaced when the Khutsuri appeared. Georgian linguists who study say their spelling is phonemic.

Georgian Alphabet

Vocabulary

Georgian has a rich word-derivation system. By using a root, and adding some definite prefixes and suffixes, one can derive many nouns and adjectives from the root. For example, from the root -Kart-, the following words can be derived: Kartveli (a Georgian person), Kartuli (the Georgian language) and Sakartvelo (Georgia).

Most Georgian surnames end in -dze ("son") (Western Georgia), -shvili ("child") (Eastern Georgia), -ia (Western Georgia, Samegrelo), -ani (Western Georgia, Svaneti), -uri (Eastern Georgia), etc. The ending -eli is a particle of nobility, equivalent to French de, German von or Polish -ski. At least two personalities with Georgian surnames are known abroad: Eduard Shevardnadze and Joseph Stalin, whose birth name was Dzhugashvili. In the 1990s, British soccer team Manchester City had a number of Georgian players with these surname endings, such as Georgi Kinkladze, Murtazi Shelia, Kakakber Tshkadadze and Mikhail Kavelashvili.

Georgian has a vigesimal number system, based on the counting system of 20, like Basque or Old French. In order to express a number greater than 20 and less than 100, first the number of 20s in the number is stated and the remaining number is added. For example, 93 is expressed as ოთხმოცდაცამეტი - otkh-m-ots-da-tsamet'i (lit. four-times-twenty-and-thirteen).

Grammar

The Georgian language belongs to the South Caucasian or Kartvelian family. Some of its characteristics are akin to those of Slavic languages such as its system of verbal aspect, but Georgian grammar is remarkably different from Indo-European languages and has many distinct features, such as split ergativity and a polypersonal verb agreement system.

Morphosyntactic alignment:
Georgian syntax and verb agreement are largely those of a nominative-accusative language. That is, the subject of an intransitive verb and the subject of a transitive verb are treated alike when it comes to word order within the sentence and their agreement marks in the verb complex. Nominative-accusative alignment is the most common in the world's languages, and is found in all Western Indo-European languages (such as English, German, and French).

However, Georgian case morphology (that is, the declension of nouns using case marks) does not always coincide with verbal alignment. Georgian has often been said to exhibit split ergativity; morphologically speaking, it is said that it mostly behaves like an ergative-absolutive language in the Series II ("aorist") screeves. That means that the subject of an intransitive verb will take the same case markings as the direct object of a transitive verb. However, this is not a fully accurate representation.

This is because Georgian has yet another level of split ergativity. In the aorist series, intransitive verbs behave differently. Second conjugation verbs behave as would normally be expected in an ergative language: the subject is declined in the least-marked case, the nominative case (terminologically equivalent in this instance to absolutive cases in other languages). Third conjugation verbs behave as if they belonged to an accusative system: the most-marked case (the ergative) marks the subject. The division between second and third conjugations is a convenient way to remember the difference, but in fact they both contain intransitive verbs, and as a whole the behaviour of these verbs follows an active alignment. In an active language, intranstive verbs are subdivided into two classes. The division is usually based on semantic criteria regarding the nature of the subject and the verb; for example, if the subject identifies an agent (an active or intentional performer of the action of the verb), then it might be marked with one case (e.g. the ergative), while if the subject identifies an experiencer of the event or one who does not actively initiate it, then it might be marked with another case (e.g. the absolutive or nominative). What might be called the "most active" case, then, marks the subject of a transitive verb, while the "least active" or "most patientive" case is that used to mark a direct object. This is precisely what happens in Georgian, in the restricted environment of the second or third conjugation verbs in the aorist series.

In Georgian, the classification of verbs according to the agentive or patientive nature of their subject has to do with performing an action, regardless of whether the subject is in control or not. (There are some exceptions to this: weather verbs and verbs of emission of light and sound are usually zero-place predicates, and thus have no agent at all.) The division between classes is conventional and rigid; each verb receives the class that typically corresponds to it. Where the subject is typically an active performer, it is marked as ergative, even if in some specific instances the action might be outside the control of the subject. Therefore, Georgian active alignment is said to be of the "split-S" type.

Case system:
Georgian has seven grammatical cases: nominative, ergative (also known in the Kartvelological literature as the narrative (mot'q'robiti) case, due to the rather inaccurate suggestion of regular ergativity, and that this case occurs generally only in the aorist series, which usually moves the narrative forward), dative, genitive, instrumental, adverbial and vocative.

The nominative, ergative and dative are core cases, and due to the complex morphosyntactic alignment of Georgian, each one has several different functions and also overlap with each other, in different contexts. They will be treated together with the verb system.

The non-core cases are the genitive, the instrumental, the adverbial and the vocative.

The genitive case is the equivalent of the preposition of or the possessive clitic -'s in English. In the phrase "the republic of Georgia", the word "Georgia" is in the genitive case: Sakartvelos resp'ublik'a.
The instrumental case corresponds to the preposition with in English, as in, "he is cutting with a knife", where the word "knife" is in the instrumental case. It also occurs with the objects of certain postpositions.
The adverbial case commonly marks adverbial phrases. It is also used in some other contexts, especially while using the name of languages. For example, in the sentence "can you translate this to Georgian?", Georgian is in the adverbial case.
The vocative case is used in addressing someone. when, for example, a mother calls her child with batono? (meaning "sir?"), the child says "yes?". An interesting fact about the Georgian vocative case is that with proper names, the use of the vocative case sounds condescending or rude, and so it tends to be limited to common nouns: rogora xart, Zurab (*Zurabo)? ("How are you, Zurab?").

Nouns:
The declension of a noun depends on whether the root of the noun ends with a vowel or a consonant. If the root of the noun ends with a vowel, the declension can be either truncating (roots ending with -''e'' or -''a'') or non-truncating (roots ending with -''o'' or -''u''). In the truncating declensions, the last vowel of the word stem is lost in the genitive and the instrumental cases.

Pluralization:
The plural number is marked with the suffix -eb, which appears after the root of the noun and before the case suffix. Some examples are:

The nominative case of men in Georgian is constructed as, k'ats+eb+i, while the ergative case would be, k'ats+eb+ma.

The nominative case of trees in Georgian (xe, root ending with truncating vowel -e) is, xe+eb+i, while the dative case would be, xe+eb+s.

The nominative case of girls in Georgian (gogo, root ending with non-truncating vowel -o) is, gogo+eb+i, while the instrumental case would be, gogo+eb+it.

It is important to state that, however, the plural suffix is not used when the noun is preceded by a quantifier of some kind, such as a cardinal number. Therefore, for example, "five men" in Georgian is expressed as, "xuti (5) k'atsi," not, *"xuti k'atsebi." Additionally, in certain formal contexts, Georgian uses Old Georgian case endings distinct from those of modern Georgian: Sabch'ota Sakartvelo ("Soviet Georgia", lit. "Georgia of Soviets").

Pronouns:
The following table lists the declension of all six personal pronouns.

Nominative Ergative Dative Genitive Instrumental Adverbial Vocative
First person (singular) me me me chem(s) chemit chemad -
Second person (singular) shen shen shen shen(s) shenit shenad she!
Third person (singular) is (i)man (i)mas (i)mis (i)mit imad -
First person (plural) chven chven chven chven(s) chvenit chvenad -
Second person (plural) tkven tkven tkven tkven(s) tkvenit tkvenad tkve!
Third person (plural) isini (i)mat (i)mat (i)mat (i)mat (i)mat -

As can be seen from the table, all the cases of the third persons except the nominative case can be expressed in two different ways; with or without an "i" at the beginning of the pronoun. The extra letter "i" adds a directional meaning. The closest English equivalent could be the distinction between his, her and that. An example can be "her pencil" versus "that (girl)'s pencil." In English "that" can never behave as a pronoun, but in Georgian, the additional letter "i" makes that possible.

Adjectives:
Georgian does not properly speaking distinguish nouns from adjectives; rather, it distinguishes modifiers from modified by relative position in the nominal clause. As a result of this, things that might sound like adjectives can have substantive force in Georgian: one could say mindoda lurji ts'igni ("I would like the blue book") or just mindoda lurji ("I would like the blue one"). The declension of these adjective-like modifiers is different from that of nouns, but like that of nouns, it depends on whether the root of the adjective ends with a consonant or a vowel: a vowel-final-stem adjective is identical in all cases, while a consonant-final-stem adjective changes from case to case. (Put another way, one might say that vowel-final-stem adjectives do not actually decline for case.)

Useful expressions in Georgian

გამარჯობა /gamaryoba/ Hello
როგორ ხარ? /rogor jar/ ¿How are you?
ნახვამდის /najvamdis/ See you later
მადლობა /madloba/ Thank you
დიდი მადლობა /didi madloba/ Thank you very much
ბოდიში /bodishi/ Excuse me
მე ვარ ქართველი /me var qart'veli/ I am Georgian(fem.)
რა გქვია შენ? /ra gqvia shen/ What is your name?
მე მქვია გიორგი /me mqvia guiorgui/ My name is Giorgi
სასიამოვნოა თქვენი გაცნობა /sasiamovnoa t'qveni gatsnoba/ Its a pleasure meeting you
გაუმარჯოს! /gaumaryos/ Cheers!(when toasting)
გილოცავ /gilotsav/ Congratulations
გილოცავთ დაბადების დღეს /gilocavth dabadebis dghes / Happy Birthday

Source: Wikipedia