The Georgian script is particularly beautiful, with complicated, elegantly shaped letters like ლ. It has intrigued me ever since I discovered it, but it is a lot of work to learn an alphabet for which you have no use, so I never got round to it.
Getting Started
Georgia is an interesting country for many reasons. It has managed to retain a unique language and culture despite having been invaded repeatedly over the centuries, from all sides. It is one of the oldest civilizations in the world, and it is the birthplace of winemaking. It still has a unique technique for making wine, resulting in wines different from anything else in the world, in Europe or elsewhere. For all these reasons, I have been tempted to visit for several years. Finally, now that the Covid crisis is over, we were able to organise a trip there, which I’ve described here.
This at last gave me a reason to learn the Georgian alphabet. I find it really unpleasant if I can’t decipher signs and so on, even if they don’t mean anything to me.
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The Georgian Mkhedruli Alphabet |
The alphabet contains 33 letters. Faced with just a list of letters, it’s very hard to know where to start. Fortunately I found an excellent website which presents them in groups of 3 or 4, with exercises for each group. Using this, and working through each group three or four times, it took just a couple of days to memorise the letters to the point of being able to decipher and to write Georgian text.
The word “decipher” is important. A fluent reader, in any language, reads a whole sentence at a single glance. At the other extreme, when you first learn an alphabet, you go through letter by letter, decoding them individually. It’s slow and very frustrating, especially when you’re in a car or bus and you only manage the first few letters before you can no longer see what you are trying to read. It takes lots of practice, and knowledge of the language, to read faster than that.
One nice thing about Georgian is that the writing system is completely phonetic. Every letter is pronounced, and pronounced as written. Conversely, if you hear a word, you know exactly how to write it. This is very different from English, whose spelling is notoriously and horribly irregular, or French, where you never know how many letters at the end of a word not to pronounce.
On the other hand, several of the letters have variant shapes, some of which are not well documented. More on that later.
A lot of the letters are confusingly similar. For example კ and პ (/k’/ and /p’/ respectively) differ only in the presence of the tiny top bar of პ. This is true of the Latin alphabet too, but we get completely used to it and don’t notice for example the similarity between ’h’ and ‘b’ or ‘O’ and ‘Q’.
It's wrong to talk about the Georgian alphabet, because actually there are three of them. Here I've only talked about Mkhedruli. which is universal for everything written nowadays. There are also two historical alphabets, Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri. The former now appears only in inscriptions in churches, and the latter nowhere at all. There is little visual resemblance between the three. If you wanted to learn the two historical alphabets, it would be starting over. But there's little point anyway.
Phonetics
Most of the sounds in Georgian exist in English also. Those sounds are easy. Some are not so easy for an English speaker:
- ხ /χ/ - like the ‘ch’ in ‘loch’
- ღ /ɣ/ or /ʁ/ - similar to the Parisian French pronunciation of ‘r’ or Spanish ‘ll’
- ყ /q/ - like Arabic ‘q’, similar to a ‘k’ but pronounced at the very back of the mouth
Then there are the so-called glottalized consonants. Many of the plosives have this variant. In the list below, each of the second letter is “glottalized” and the first one isn’t.
Unglottalized | Glottalized | Sound |
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It’s very hard for a non-native to figure out the difference. I asked a few people to say the two letters, and in isolation they sound very different. The glottalized variant is forced out much harder, and the un-glottalized version sounds softer. In theory, to pronounce the glottalized form you make a glottal stop which you release forcefully as you articulate the plosive - hence the name. But it’s very hard to do this in connected speech, as opposed to a single isolated consonant. Listening carefully to people speaking - even though I didn’t understand anything - I couldn’t hear any distinction. I suspect that for a foreigner, unless you really want to try to sound like a native, you can just ignore the distinction completely.
The letter ვ is glossed as /v/, but I read somewhere that it often degenerates to /β/, the bilabial fricative - similar to /v/ but made by pressing your lips gently together rather than your top teeth and bottom lip. At one place we visited I heard the ვ in qvevri pronounced more like /w/, making it sound like “kwewri”.
When transcribing other languages into Georgian, there is no exact match for the /f/ sound. The letter ფ (/p/) is used in this case. That makes sense because there is very little difference between /p/ and /ɸ/, the voiceless bilabial fricative, which in turn is almost indistinguishable, audibly, from /f/.
Variations
A complication of the Georgian alphabet is that several of the letters have different variant forms. That’s not unique to Georgian - for example in the Latin script, ‘g’ can also be written as ‘g’, and ‘a’ can also be written as ‘ɑ’. We’re so used to this that we don’t even notice it, but to a foreigner learning the Latin alphabet for the first time, these appear as completely different symbols. We also have upper and lower case, meaning that there are actually 52 symbols to learn, not 26. And we have fonts with and without serifs - it’s not at all obvious to our foreigner that ‘I’ and ‘I’ are the same symbol.
Georgian takes variations a bit further, though. First, there are three letters that are generally simplified, and in print do not resemble the characters shown in the picture at the top. These are among the most spectacularly squiggly letters, and in normal type and handwriting are always simplified.
Next, there are letters that are routinely simplified, though not in most fonts. For example ლ (/l/) can be simplified to a single loop, carefully skipping the double-loop ღ which is a completely different letter.
(These are hand-drawn because it's impossible to be sure of getting the right glyphs otherwise. There is only a single Unicode code-point for each character - which glyph you get depends entirely on the font).
There is no true upper case in Georgian - for example, sentences begin with normal letters. But there is an alphabet variation called Mtavruli that has been proposed as such in the past, and is still widely used in signs, adverts and the like. Mostly, the only difference is that the letters have a constant height, with no ascenders or descenders. Some letters, though, can be greatly simplified, as shown in the sketch above.
Just opposite our hotel was a shop with this sign. The first letter, and the last but two and last but one, don’t look anything like any “official” Georgian letter. In fact they are greatly-simplified versions of ლ რ დ respectively. So the whole name is ლომბარდი, “lombardi” (meaning pawnbroker). These characters very often appear on signs and such, but I’ve yet to find anything that describes them. I did find a font that shows them, below.
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