Exploring the Georgian Alphabet (ქართული დამწერლობა)

Photo taken by me at the Ceremonial Palace of Georgia (formerly the Presidential Administration of Georgia) in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Exploring the Georgian Alphabet (ქართული დამწერლობა)

Preface

The Georgian alphabet is a very pretty set of characters and sounds. When I was backpacking in Tbilisi and Kutaisi, I understood about 0% of the language or alphabet. By the end of my trip, I knew more Serbo-Croatian (which is to say barely a few words) than Georgian thanks to my Croatian friend I met at my hostel in Zagreb. Despite my best efforts, I could not seem to nail my pronunciation of "hvala" (thank you).
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Anyways, I put it on my bucket list to take a stab at the alphabet and see how far I got. I was very conflicted, since I was also enamored by the language spoken by Georgia's southern neighbor, Armenian. I loved the way Armenian looks when written, but I didn't get to hear much of it spoken due to the massive influx (and cultural takeover?) of Russian in Yerevan. I still remember a funny moment when I was walking through a restaurant patio and heard some words I (unexpectedly) understood. I had only gotten to Yerevan that morning after a very tiring morning at Zvartnots Intl. Airport, and had not fully understood the sheer number of Russians in the city. So when I overheard a man say to his partner while nodding in my direction "у него Рубашка французская" (He has a French shirt), I didn't really think about it until I was down the street. Then I realized, "was he talking about me? Was that Russian?" I guess so. I'm not sure how many other Armenians or Russians like to wear Picture Organic Clothing. France is pretty far from Armenia.

I captured these shots early that morning at Zvartnots, after I finally dodged about 20 taxicab drivers, who could tell I was a foreigner, and unfortunately gathered that I wasn't Russian either. My Russian was just about as broken as it gets, as this was my second time ever speaking Russian aside from Armenian Passport Control ten minutes beforehand. At that point, I was more than happy with my beyond-brief interaction with an Armenian border guard. When I went to retrieve my bag from the X-ray machine, I asked him "Это всё?" (That's all?) and he responded with a nod, and a satisfying "Да - все хорошо" (Yes, everything's good). And thankfully, everything was good - I was not ready for anything else after two back-to-back red-eye flights in London and Antalya.

Linguistic Culture of Georgia and Armenia

Back to the topic at hand, I decided to go with Georgian. I would love to go back to Georgia and speak some of their language, rather than opening a conversation in Russian, since many Georgians view Russian as the language of the oppressor due to their Soviet history and the 2008 Russo-Georgian war. It feels like a tenuous relationship, where Russian is still the lingua franca of the South Caucasus, but many Georgians (especially younger Georgians) have a strong reflex to fight Russian cultural imperialism. Georgia has been steadily attempting to assimilate into the European Union, and the lean towards English as the lingua franca is definitely one of the more obvious affects.

This is very different than Georgia's southern neighbor, Armenia. Take for instance, a simple gauge of language: signs. It's night and day. I struggled to even find one or two signs in Russian in Tbilisi, versus Yerevan, where you can't turn your head without reading Russian.

Armenians typically hold pro-Russian views and are more tolerant of Russian speakers (and Russification). Even still, I think the mass exodus of Russians has hit Yerevan even harder than metropolitan areas in Georgia, and it seems like even typically pro-Russian Armenians are feeling resentful of this takeover.
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The Georgian Language

When I was in the South Caucasus, I thought that Armenian and Georgian must be similar, as they both looked similar visually. It turns out this is not true at all. They're from two completely different language families, and are not even slightly mutually intelligible. Georgian is the largest language in the Kartvelian language family, spoken almost exclusively in the South Caucasus. It's spoken in modern day Georgia, but also in two Russian administered regions, Ossetia and Abkhazia, as well as northwestern Azerbaijan and northeastern Turkey.

Modern Georgian uses the Mkhedruli (მქედრული) script, with 33 letters. It once had 40, but 7 have since been removed after becoming obsolete. Georgian is a very old language; the Mkhedruli script has its roots in the 10th century.

Georgian Script in the English Alphabet

I often find that English is not a good medium to understand the pronunciation of non-western languages, and I think (Russian) Cyrillic typically offers some nice insight on pronunciation.

In this case, Cyrillic is somewhat helpful, but by not a lot, as we can see Cyrillic runs into the same issues that English does, needing to pronounce certain characters with a sharper sound like the ტ character. Though, it does help me, since the Cyrillic characters Ж, В, Ч, Р, Ш, У, and Л are all much truer to the Georgian pronunciation.

Application of Georgian

Why not start with my name? Since there's no F or Ф equivalent in Georgian, we have to go with a soft p sound. My first name is Flynn, so my first name in Georgian is ფლჲნნ, and my last name is Condit, or ქონდით

Flynn Condit - ფლჲნნ ქონდით

Takeaways

Georgian is beautiful language that reminds me both of Russian and Arabic. It has one of the most unique scripts in the world, and I'm excited to learn more. Maybe one day I'll end up there again.