1. The language of Georgia
2. British architecture from the reigns of King George I to IV.
3. Poetic style from the reign of George V.
The language of
Georgia in the
Caucasus Mountains is the main member of the small
Kartvelian (or South Caucasian) family. They have no known connexion with any languages outside the Caucasus.
Georgian is written in the Mkhedruli or military script; there was also another called the Khutsuri or ecclesiastical. This is a simple alphabet of 33 letters, namely A B G D E V Z T I K' L M N O P' ZH R S T' U P K GH Q SH CH TS DZ TS' CH' KH J H. (Several other obsolete letters are added when the letters are used as numbers.)
The difference between T and T', and likewise with K' P' CH' and TS', is that the apostrophe indicates an ejective sound, one made with a simultaneous glottal stop. The other one of the pair is aspirated, that is has a slight H sound after it. Confusingly, sometimes in place name transcriptions this convention is reversed, and T' is used for the aspirated, T for the ejective. The letter Q is also ejective, and Georgian has no aspirated (or voiced) version; however, the closely related language Mingrelian has distinct Q and Q'.
Georgian is notorious for its consonant clusters, as in
- zghva = 'sea'
- ts'qnari = 'quiet'
- tskheni = 'horse'
- msgavsad = 'similar'
- psk'eri = 'bottom'
- Tbilisi, the capital
- khelmdzghvaneli = 'leader'
- t'qviamprkvevi = 'gun'
Not all clusters are permitted. There is an agreement rule for oral stops: they have to agree in phonation (aspirated, ejective, or voiced) if they move from front to back in place of articulation. So ts'k', tsk, dzg are permitted, but not ts'k, tsg, dzk' etc. But tb in Tbilisi is permitted because the stops move from back to front. The restriction does not apply if another consonant intervenes. In tabular form the following consonants are affected:
p t ts ch k
p' t' ts' ch' k' q
b d dz j g
Grammatically the verb is very complicated, with many suppletive and irregular forms to memorize.
Nouns have case forms but these are fairly regular. The plural is formed with -eb-, as tskhenebi 'horses'. It has an ergative case in -ma, but how the subject and other parts of a sentence are marked depends on the tense and mood, perfect and present and future having different systems.
This tense/mood complex is called in English a 'screeve', from the Georgian mskrivi 'row'.
The numerals one to ten are erti, ori, sami, otkhi, khuti, ekvsi, shvidi, rva, tskhra, ati.
The native name for the language is Kartuli ena. A Georgian person is Kartveli, and the country is Sakartvelo.
Stress is weak, and usually antepenultimate. But many surnames end in -dze or -vili, and with both of these stress is penultimate, as in President Eduard ShevardNAdze.
A
neo-classical style of
architecture predominant in
Britain in the reigns of the first four
Georges, 1714-1820. Not only was it beautifully
proportioned, it exemplifies
elegance and
restraint, in contrast to the
baroque,
rococo,
Victorian, and imperial styles before it, after it, and on other countries. They knew what size people were, and built to that size.
Large parts of London and Edinburgh and especially the World Heritage city of Bath have big sweeping sections of Georgian squares, rows, and crescents, as if mass produced, yet keeping their artistic character all the more in the mass.
The term Georgian is also applied to a fairly quiet,
pastoral school of English
poetry in the early part of the reign of
George V (1910-1936), as opposed to the experimentation of
modernism and
imagism. Leading Georgian poets were
Walter de la Mare,
Robert Graves,
Siegfried Sassoon, and
Rupert Brooke. The movement, a reaction to high Victorianism, was obscured by the revolution started by the publication of
The Waste Land in 1922.