The most conspicuous member of the Caucasian family is Georgian with about four million speakers and a written literature spanning sixteen centuries. Although the concept of upper- versus lower-case doesn’t exist in its distinctive curlicued alphabet, Georgian newspaper headlines often display a font re-proportioned into a more block-like form called majuscule for the sake of emphasis. Non-Georgians aspiring to learn this language won’t find any familiar landmarks, but at least they’ll be delighted to hear that it has no genders. Another simplicity is Georgian’s one-vowel, one-syllable principle: The word gaaakhla (“he renewed it”), for example, has four syllables. Like other Caucasian languages Georgian does feature ejectives which are bursts emitted from compressed air in the mouth, and takes no prisoners when it comes to long chains of consonants. Classical examples of the latter are vprtskvni (“I am peeling it”) and gvbrdr’vnit (“you tear us into pieces”). There are also two different T sounds and a version of the K (which we transcribe with a Q) produced further back in the throat like the Arabic letter qaf. The Georgian name for Pluto’s companion, Charon, which I don’t show below, uses this latter sound: qaroni. If you would like to see Georgians speaking their native language — and more importantly, to enjoy an eerie political satire that won the Grande Prix at Cannes in 1987 — you’ll want to buy or rent Tengiz Abuladze’s Repentance. It comes with English subtitles. |
