Грузинский язык: история, структура и особенности

Official language of Georgia

Standard Georgian is largely based on the Kartlian dialect. Over the centuries, it has exerted a strong influence on the other dialects. As a result, they are all, generally, mutually intelligible with standard Georgian, and with one another.

The history of the Georgian language is conventionally divided into the following phases: The first direct attestations of the language are inscriptions and palimpsests dating to the 5th century, and the oldest surviving literary work is the 5th century Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik by Iakob Tsurtaveli. The emergence of Georgian as a written language appears to have been the result of the Christianization of Georgia in the mid 4th century, which led to the replacement of Aramaic as the literary language. By the 11th century, Old Georgian had developed into Middle Georgian. The most famous work of this period is the epic poem The Knight in the Panther's Skin, written by Shota Rustaveli in the 12th century. In 1629, a certain Nikoloz Cholokashvili authored the first printed books written (partially) in Georgian, the Alphabetum Ibericum sive Georgianum cum Oratione and the Dittionario giorgiano e italiano. These were meant to help western Catholic missionaries learn Georgian for evangelical purposes.

Prosody in Georgian involves stress, intonation, and rhythm. Stress is very weak, and linguists disagree as to where stress occurs in words. According to Borise, Georgian has fixed initial word level stress cued primarily by greater syllable duration and intensity of the initial syllable of a word. Georgian vowels in non initial syllables are pronounced with a shorter duration compared to vowels in initial syllables.

Georgian contains many "harmonic clusters" involving two consonants of a similar type (voiced, aspirated, or ejective) that are pronounced with only a single release; e. g. ბგერა bgera (sound), ცხოვრება tskhovreba (life), and [[wikt:წყალი ts'q'ali (water). There are also frequent consonant clusters, sometimes involving more than six consonants in a row, as may be seen in words like [[wikt:გვფრცქვნი gvprtskvni ("you peel us") and [[wikt:მწვრთნელი mts'vrtneli ("trainer"). Vicenik has observed that Georgian vowels following ejective stops have creaky voice and suggests this may be one cue distinguishing ejectives from their aspirated and voiced counterparts.

This is the Georgian standard keyboard layout. The standard Windows keyboard is essentially that of manual typewriters.

Georgian is an agglutinative language. Certain prefixes and suffixes can be joined in order to build a verb. In some cases, one verb can have up to eight different morphemes in it at the same time. An example is ageshenebinat ("you (pl.) should have built (it)"). The verb can be broken down to parts: a g e shen eb in a t. Each morpheme here contributes to the meaning of the verb tense or the person who has performed the verb. The verb conjugation also exhibits polypersonalism; a verb may potentially include morphemes representing both the subject and the object.

In Georgian morphophonology, syncope is a common phenomenon. When a suffix (especially the plural suffix eb ) is attached to a word that has either of the vowels a or e in the last syllable, this vowel is, in most words, lost. For example, megobari means "friend". To say "friends", one says megobrebi (megobØrebi), with the loss of a in the last syllable of the word stem.

Georgian has seven noun cases: nominative, ergative, dative, genitive, instrumental, adverbial and vocative. An interesting feature of Georgian is that, while the subject of a sentence is generally in the nominative case and the object is in the accusative case (or dative), one can find this reversed in many situations (this depends mainly on the character of the verb). This is called the dative construction. In the past tense of the transitive verbs, and in the present tense of the verb "to know", the subject is in the ergative case.

Georgian is a left branching language, in which adjectives precede nouns, possessors precede possessions, objects normally precede verbs, and postpositions are used instead of prepositions. Each postposition (whether a suffix or a separate word) requires the modified noun to be in a specific case. This is similar to the way prepositions govern specific cases in many Indo European languages such as German, Latin, or Russian. Georgian is a pro drop language; both subject and object pronouns are frequently omitted except for emphasis or to resolve ambiguity. A study by Skopeteas et al. concluded that Georgian word order tends to place the focus of a sentence immediately before the verb, and the topic before the focus. A subject–object–verb (SOV) word order is common in idiomatic expressions and when the focus of a sentence is on the object. A subject–verb–object (SVO) word order is common when the focus is on the subject, or in longer sentences. Object initial word orders (OSV or OVS) are also possible, but less common. Verb initial word orders including both subject and object (VSO or VOS) are extremely rare. Georgian has no grammatical gender; even the pronouns are ungendered. Georgian has no articles. Therefore, for example, "guest", "a guest" and "the guest" are said in the same way. In relative clauses, however, it is possible to establish the meaning of the definite article through use of some particles.

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, comparable to French de, German von or Polish ski. Georgian has a vigesimal numeric system like Basque or (partially) French. Numbers greater than 20 and less than 100 are described as the sum of the greatest possible multiple of 20 plus the remainder. For example, "93" literally translates as "four times twenty plus thirteen" (ოთხმოცდაცამეტი – otkhmotsdatsamet'i). One of the most important Georgian dictionaries is the Explanatory dictionary of the Georgian language (Georgian: ქართული ენის განმარტებითი ლექსიკონი). It consists of eight volumes and about 115,000 words. It was produced between 1950 and 1964, by a team of linguists under the direction of Arnold Chikobava.