Georgian alphabet

Georgian Alphabet

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Georgian alphabet

The Georgian alphabet is the writing system currently used to write the Georgian language

Georgian language

Georgian is the official language of Georgia , a country in the Caucasus .Georgian is the primary language of about 3.9 million people in Georgia itself, and of another 500,000 abroad ....
and other South Caucasian (Kartvelian) languages

South Caucasian languages

The South Caucasian languages are spoken primarily in Georgia , with smaller groups of speakers in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia and Israel....
(Mingrelian, Svan

Svan language

The Svan language is a language spoken in Northwest Georgia ....
and sometimes Laz

Laz language

The Laz language is spoken by the Laz people on the Southeast shore of the Black Sea. It is estimated that there are between around 30,000 native speakers of Laz in Turkey, in a strip of land extending from Melyat to the Georgian border , and about 2,000 in Georgia ....
), and occasionally other languages of the Caucasus

Caucasus

The Caucasus or Caucas is a geopolitical region located between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. It is home to Europe's highest mountain ....
(such as Ossetic

Ossetic language

Ossetian , also sometimes called Ossete, is an Eastern Iranian languages language spoken in Ossetia, a region on the slopes of the Caucasus Caucasus Mountains....
and Abkhaz

Abkhaz language

Abkhaz is a Northwest Caucasian languages spoken mainly by the Abkhaz people in Georgia , Turkey, and in Abkhazia, the republic that is generally accepted as part of Georgia, but that is recognized as independent by Russia and Nicaragua....
in the 1940s). The Georgian language has phonemic orthography

Phonemic orthography

A phonemic orthography is a writing system where the written graphemes correspond to phonemes, the spoken sounds of the language. These are sometimes termed true alphabets, but non-alphabetic writing systems like syllabary can be phonemic as well....
and the modern alphabet has thirty-three letters.

The Georgian word for "alphabet" is ?????? [anbani], derived from the names of the first two letters of each of the three independent Georgian alphabets, which have the interesting characteristic of looking very dissimilar to one another yet which share the same alphabetic order and may be seen mixed to some extent, even though there is no official distinction between upper and lower case in writing the Georgian language.

writing of the Georgian language has progressed through three Georgian-based forms (known from a transliteration of their Georgian names: asomtavruli, nuskhuri, and mkhedruli) that have always been distinct alphabets, even if they have been used together to write the same languages, and even though these alphabets share the same letter names.

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History of the Georgian alphabets

The writing of the Georgian language has progressed through three Georgian-based forms (known from a transliteration of their Georgian names: asomtavruli, nuskhuri, and mkhedruli) that have always been distinct alphabets, even if they have been used together to write the same languages, and even though these alphabets share the same letter names. However, the last one contains more letters than the two historical ones, even if those extra letters are no longer needed for writing modern Georgian:

Asomtavruli, the historical monumental alphabet

Georgia (kingdom of Iberia

Caucasian Iberia

Iberia , also known as Iveria , was a name given by the ancient Ancient Greece and Roman Empire to the ancient Georgia kingdom of Kartli corresponding roughly to the eastern and southern parts of the present day Georgia....
) was converted to nominal Christianity

Christianity

Christianity is a Monotheistic religion #Christian view religion centered on the life and teachings of Jesus as New Testament view on Jesus' life....
in the 330s AD. Scholars believe that the creation of a Georgian alphabet was instrumental in making religious scripture more accessible to the Georgians. This happened in the 4th or 5th century, not long after the conversion. The oldest uncontested example of Georgian writing is an asomtavruli inscription from 430 AD in a church in Bethlehem

Bethlehem

Bethlehem is a Palestine city in the central West Bank, approximately south of Jerusalem, with a population of about 30,000 people. It is the capital of the Bethlehem Governorate of the Palestinian National Authority and a hub of Palestinian culture and tourism....
.

Examples of the earliest alphabet, the asomtavruli (also known as mrgvlovani), are still preserved in monumental inscriptions such as those of the Georgian church in Bethlehem

Bethlehem

Jerusalem

Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and its List of Israeli cities in both population and area, with a population of 747,600 residents over an area of if Positions on Jerusalem East Jerusalem is included....
, 430) and the church of Bolnisi Sioni near Tbilisi

Tbilisi

Tbilisi , is the capital city and the largest city of Georgia , lying on the banks of the Mt'k'vari River. The name is derived from an early Georgian form Tpilisi and it was officially known as ?????? in Russian, until 1936....
(4th-5th centuries).

Asomtavruli (???????????,"capital letters") derives from aso (???, "letter, type") and mtavari (???????, "main, chief, principal, head"). Mrgvlovani (??????????, "rounded") is related to the word mrgvali (???????, "round").

Despite its common Georgian name, this rounded alphabet was originally purely unicameral

Unicase

A unicase or unicameral alphabet is one that has no case for its letters. Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Georgian alphabet and Hangul are unicase alphabets, while Latin alphabet, Greek alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet and Armenian alphabet have two cases for each letter, e.g., A/a, B/b, C/c etc....
, just like the modern Georgian alphabet.

Incidentally, a unique local form of Aramaic writing known as Armazuli
Armazi

Armazi was, according to the medieval Georgia chronicles, the supreme god in a paganism pantheon of ancient Georgians of Kartli .Georgian literary tradition credits the first king of Kartli, Parnavaz I of Iberia , with the raising of the idol Armazi ? reputedly named after him ? on a mountain at his capital, and the construction of a Arm...
(???????? ?????????? [armazuli damts'erloba], i.e. the "Armazian script") existed before that, as demonstrated by the 1940s discovery of a bilingual Greco-Aramaic inscription at Mtskheta

Mtskheta

Mtskheta , one of the oldest cities of the country of Georgia , is located approximately 20 kilometers northeast of Tbilisi at the confluence of the Aragvi and Mtkvari rivers....
, Georgia. It is conceivable that local pre-Christian records did exist, but were subsequently destroyed by zealous nominal Christians. Many found more palatable the idea that the medieval Georgian chronicles actually refer to the introduction of a local form of written Aramaic during the reign of Parnavaz.

Georgian historical tradition attributed the invention of the Georgian alphabets to the semi-mythical Parnavaz I of Iberia in the 3rd century BC. The modern Georgian scholar Levan Chilashvili

Levan Chilashvili

Levan Chilashvili was a famous Georgia archaeologist and historian, an academician of the Georgian Academy of Sciences , Meritorious Scholar of Georgia, Doctor of Historical Sciences, and Professor....
, on the basis of dating the Nekresi inscription in eastern Georgia to the 1st-2nd century AD, claimed that Parnavaz probably created the scripts in order to translate the Avesta

Avesta

The Avesta is the primary collection of sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, composed in the Avestan language....
(sacred Zoroastrian writings) into Georgian. However, a pre-Christian origin for the Georgian scripts has not been firmly supported by archaeological evidence.

None of above-mentioned traditions seems to have much currency as, in the view of modern scholars, the only convincing explanation for the similarities has to be the same influences rather than the same creator.

Asomtavruli letters



Note that some fonts for modern Georgian are not showing the actual Asomtavruli monumental letter forms for these letters, but are instead showing taller (capitalized) variants of the modern Mkhedruli alphabet (see below).

This unicameral alphabet is still used today in some section headings and book titles, and sometimes used in a pseudo-bicameral way by varying the glyph sizes for creating capitals. Since it is no longer used for writing Georgian, it has also been reused in a creative way for writing capital letters, along with letters of one of the two other Georgian alphabets.

Nuskhuri ("minuscule, lowercase"), the ecclesiastical alphabet

The nuskhuri (??????? "minuscule, lowercase") alphabet first appeared in the 9th century. It was mostly used in ecclesiastical works. Nuskhuri is related to the word nuskha (????? "inventory, schedule").

The forms of the Khutsuri letters may have been derived from the northern Arsacid variant of the Pahlavi (or Middle Iranian) script, which itself was derived from the older Aramaic

Aramaic alphabet

The Aramaic alphabet has been called an abjad--that is, a consonantal alphabet -- used for writing Aramaic language. It is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet, and became distinctive from it by the eighth century BCE....
, although the direction of writing (from left to right), the use of separate symbols for the vowel sounds, the numerical values assigned to the letters in earlier times, and the order of the letters all point to significant Greek

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
influence on the script.

However, the Georgian linguist Tamaz Gamkrelidze

Tamaz Gamkrelidze

Tamaz V. Gamkrelidze is a distinguished Georgia linguistics, orientalist and public benefactor, Academician and President of the Georgian Academy of Sciences , Doctor of Sciences , Professor ....
argues that the forms of the letters are freely invented in imitation of the Greek model rather than directly based upon earlier forms of the Aramaic alphabet, even though the Georgian phonological inventory is very different from Greek.

There is also a version according to which, upon creation of the Armenian alphabet

Armenian alphabet

The Armenian alphabet is an alphabet that has been used to write the Armenian language since the year 405 or 406. Up to the 19th century, Classical Armenian had been the literary language; since then, the Armenian alphabet has been used to write the two modern dialects of Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian....
by the Armenian

Armenian

Armenian may refer to:* Something of, from, or related to Armenia, a country in the South Caucasus, between Europe and Asia* Armenians, persons from Armenia, or of Armenian descent....
monk St. Mesrop, the Iberians and the Caucasian Albanians asked him to specifically design phonetic alpahabets particular to their own distinct languages. Koryun

Koryun

Koryun was the earliest Armenian language. Writing in the fifth century, his "Life of Mesrob" contains many details about the evangelism of Armenia and the invention of the Armenian alphabet....
backed this version in the 5th century.

Just like the monumental asomtavruli alphabet, this squared alphabet was initially purely unicameral.

However, it has also been used also along with the asomtavruli alphabet (serving as capital letters in religious manuscripts) to form the khutsuri (?????? "ecclesiastical") bicameral style that is still used sometimes today.

Mkhedruli ("cavalry" or "military"), the current, originally secular alphabet

The currently used alphabet, called mkhedruli (????????, "cavalry" or "military"), first appeared in the 11th century. It was used for non-religious purposes up until the eighteenth century, when it completely replaced the khutsuri style (that used the two previous alphabets). Mkhedruli is related to mkhedari (???????, "horseman", "knight", or "warrior"); khutsuri is related to khutsesi (??????, "elder" or "priest").

Mkhedruli letters
?	?	?	?	?	?	?		?	?	?	?	?	?
	?	?	?	?	?	?		?	?	?	?	?	?
?	?	?	?	?	?		?	?

Eight of the forty-one mkhedruli letters are now obsolete, namely ?(he), ?(hie), ?(vie), ?(qar), ?(hoe), ?(fi), ?(shva), ?(elifi).

Just like the two other alphabets, the mkhedruli alphabet is purely unicameral

Unicase

A unicase or unicameral alphabet is one that has no case for its letters. Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Georgian alphabet and Hangul are unicase alphabets, while Latin alphabet, Greek alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet and Armenian alphabet have two cases for each letter, e.g., A/a, B/b, C/c etc....
. However, certain modern writers have experimented with using the obsolete asomtavruli letters (see above) as capitals.

Just like with the khutsuri script style, it is also sometimes used in a bicameral way along with the monumental asomtavruli (serving as capital letters), however this appears most often results from the confusion introduced by the religious khutsuri style and ignorance rather than the result of a creative design choice. Georgians often consider this bicameral use of mkhedruli as an error, given that some old mkhedruli letters don't have any mapping to the monumental alphabet. Others are just using the mkhedruli alphabet alone in a pseudo-bicameral way, by just adapting its letter sizes to create pseudo-capital letters, known as mtavruli for titles and headings. Mtavruli (????????) means "titlecase" and is an appropriate tribute to the older Asomtavruli, which has been similarly implemented and named.

Transcription

This table only lists the modern (monocameral) mkhedruli alphabet (i.e. 33 letters that are also convertible to the other two alphabets, excluding the 8 other mkhedruli letters that are now obsolete). "National" is the official transliteration system used by the Georgian government, while "Laz" is the official system used in northeastern Turkey for the Laz language

Laz language

Letters	Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....	Name	National Georgian national system of romanization This system, adopted in February 2002 by the State Department of Geodesy and Cartography of Georgia and the Institute of Linguistics, Georgian Academy of Sciences, establishes a transliteration system of the modern Georgian alphabet in Latin alphabet....	ISO 9984 ISO 9984 The international standard ISO 9984 establishes a system for the transliteration into Latin alphabet of modern Georgian alphabet....	BGN BGN/PCGN romanization BGN/PCGN romanization refers to the systems for romanization and Roman-script spelling conventions adopted by the United States Board on Geographic Names and the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use ....	Laz Laz language The Laz language is spoken by the Laz people on the Southeast shore of the Black Sea. It is estimated that there are between around 30,000 native speakers of Laz in Turkey, in a strip of land extending from Melyat to the Georgian border , and about 2,000 in Georgia ....
?	U+10D0	an	A a	A a	? ?	? ?
?	U+10D1	ban	B b	B b	B b	B b
?	U+10D2	gan	G g	G g	G g	G g
?	U+10D3	don	D d	D d	D d	D d
?	U+10D4	en	E e	E e	E e	E e
?	U+10D5	vin	V v	V v	V v	V v
?	U+10D6	zen	Z z	Z z	Z z	Z z
?	U+10D7	tan	T t	T' t'	T' t'	T t
?	U+10D8	in	I i	I i	I i	I i
?	U+10D9	k'an	K' k'	K k	K k	K' k'
?	U+10DA	las	L l	L l	L l	L l
?	U+10DB	man	M m	M m	M m	M m
?	U+10DC	nar	N n	N n	N n	N n
?	U+10DD	on	O o	O o	O o	O o
?	U+10DE	p'ar	P' p'	P p	P p	P' p'
?	U+10DF	žan	Zh zh	Ž ž	Zh zh	J j
?	U+10E0	rae	R r	R r	R r	R r
?	U+10E1	san	S s	S s	S s	S s
?	U+10E2	t'ar	T' t'	T t	T t	T' t'
?	U+10E3	un	U u	U u	U u	U u
?	U+10E4	par	P p	P' p'	P' p'	P p
?	U+10E5	kan	K k	K' k'	K' k'	K k
?	U+10E6		Gh gh		Gh gh	G g
?	U+10E7	q'ar	Q' q'	Q q	Q q	Q q
?	U+10E8	šin	Sh sh	Š š	Sh sh	S s
?	U+10E9	cin	Ch ch	C' c'	Ch' ch'	Ç ç
?	U+10EA	can	Ts ts	C' c'	Ts' ts'	Ts ts
?	U+10EB	jil	Dz dz	J j	Dz dz	Ž ž
?	U+10EC	c'il	Ts' ts'	C c	Ts ts	Ts' ts'
?	U+10ED	c'ar	Ch' ch'	C c	Ch ch	Ç' ç'
?	U+10EE	xan	Kh kh	X x	Kh kh	X x
?	U+10EF	jan	J j	J? j	J j	C c
?	U+10F0	hae	H h	H h	H h	H h

External links

for Mac OS 10.4 at apple.com

Georgian alphabet

History of the Georgian alphabets

Asomtavruli, the historical monumental alphabet

Nuskhuri ("minuscule, lowercase"), the ecclesiastical alphabet

Mkhedruli ("cavalry" or "military"), the current, originally secular alphabet

Transcription

See also

External links