Грузинские алфавиты: история и эволюция письма

Three related alphabets used to write Georgian

The Georgian scripts are the three writing systems used to write the Georgian language: Asomtavruli, Nuskhuri and Mkhedruli. Although the systems differ in appearance, their letters share the same names and alphabetical order and are written horizontally from left to right. Of the three scripts, Mkhedruli, once the civilian royal script of the Kingdom of Georgia and mostly used for the royal charters, is now the standard script for modern Georgian and its related Kartvelian languages, whereas Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri are used only by the Georgian Orthodox Church, in ceremonial religious texts and iconography. Acharian dated the invention to 408, four years after Mashtots created the Armenian alphabet (he dated the latter event to 404). Some Western scholars quote Koryun's claims without taking a stance on its validity or concede that Armenian clerics, if not Mashtots himself, must have played a role in the creation of the Georgian script. and the Bolnisi inscriptions. From the 9th century, Nuskhuri script started becoming dominant, and the role of Asomtavruli was reduced. However, epigraphic monuments of the 10th to 18th centuries continued to be written in Asomtavruli script. Asomtavruli in this later period became more decorative. In the majority of 9th century Georgian manuscripts which were written in Nuskhuri script, Asomtavruli was used for titles and the first letters of chapters. However, some manuscripts written completely in Asomtavruli can be found until the 11th century.

In Nuskhuri manuscripts, Asomtavruli are used for titles and illuminated capitals. The latter were used at the beginnings of paragraphs which started new sections of text. In the early stages of the development of Nuskhuri texts, Asomtavruli letters were not elaborate and were distinguished principally by size and sometimes by being written in cinnabar ink. Later, from the 10th century, the letters were illuminated. The style of Asomtavruli capitals can be used to identify the era of a text. For example, in the Georgian manuscripts of the Byzantine era, when the styles of the Byzantine Empire influenced Kingdom of Georgia, capitals were illuminated with images of birds and other animals. Decorative Asomtavruli capital letters, Ⴋ (m) and Ⴇ (t), 12–13th century. From the 11th century "limb flowery", "limb arrowy" and "limb spotty" decorative forms of Asomtavruli are developed. The first two are found in 11th and 12th century monuments, whereas the third one is used until the 18th century. Importance was attached also to the colour of the ink itself. Asomtavruli letter Ⴃ (doni) is often written with decoration effects of fish and birds. The "Curly" decorative form of Asomtavruli is also used where the letters are wattled or intermingled on each other, or the smaller letters are written inside other letters. It was mostly used for the headlines of the manuscripts or the books, although there are complete inscriptions which were written in the Asomtavruli "Curly" form only. The title of Gospel of Matthew in Asomtavruli "Curly" decorative form.

Asomtavruli is used intensively in iconography, murals, and exterior design, especially in stone engravings.

The first Georgian script was included in Unicode Standard in October 1991 with the release of version 1.0. In creating the Georgian Unicode block, important roles were played by German Jost Gippert, a linguist of Kartvelian studies, and American Irish linguist and script encoder Michael Everson, who created the Georgian Unicode for the Macintosh systems. Significant contributions were also made by Anton Dumbadze and Irakli Garibashvili (not to be mistaken with the Prime Minister of Georgia Irakli Garibashvili). Georgian Mkhedruli script received an official status for being Georgia's internationalized domain name script for (.გე). Mtavruli letters were added in Unicode version 11.0 in June 2018. They are capital letters with similar letterforms to Mkhedruli, but with descenders shifted above the baseline, with a wider central oval, and with the top slightly higher than the ascender height. Before this addition, font creators included Mtavruli in various ways. Some fonts came in pairs, of which one had lowercase letters and the other uppercase; some Unicode fonts placed Mtavruli letterforms in the Asomtavruli range (U+10A0 U+10CF) or in the Private Use Area, and some ASCII based ones mapped them to the ASCII capital letters.

Georgian characters are found in three Unicode blocks. The first block (U+10A0–U+10FF) is simply called Georgian. Mkhedruli (modern Georgian) occupies the U+10D0–U+10FF range (shown in the bottom half of the first table below) and Asomtavruli occupies the U+10A0–U+10CF range (shown in the top half of the same table). The second block is the Georgian Supplement (U+2D00–U+2D2F), and it contains Nuskhuri.

Mac OS Georgian is an unofficial character encoding created by Michael Everson for Georgian on classic Mac OS. It is an extended ASCII encoding, using the 128 code points from 0x80 through 0xFF to represent the characters of the Asomtavruli and Mkhedruli scripts plus a number of widely used symbols not included in 7 bit ASCII.

Below is the standard Georgian language keyboard layout, the traditional layout of manual typewriters.

Gallery of Asomtavruli, Nuskhuri and Mkhedruli scripts.