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Old 10-Aug-2008, 13:32
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Default Re: Georgian Literature

Strange language, Georgian. I had a little look at it yesterday, as well as the literature.

First of all, it is written in an alphabet used nowhere else in the world. It's not that difficult, though totally foreign to people who use the Roman, Cyrillic or Greek alphabets. There are several consonants where you pronounce a glottal stop at the same time as the consonant. So there are two "t"s, two "k"s, etc.

Then the vocabulary has some intriguing features. The word for father is... "mama". Mother is "deda". The word for heart is... (taking some liberaties with the transliteration) "goolie". And the "-shvili" on the end of a lot of Georgian surnames simply means "child of".

The system of numbers means you say "twenty-ten", "twenty-eleven", etc., instead of 30, 31. (But even French and Danish have some odd features when counting.)

That's all I've learnt so far. Still found no more about their literature since about 1850.
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