Vocabulaire géorgien pour l’autoformation, s.i.l., T&P Books, 2014, 241 pages.
Lia Abuladze, Andreas Ludden, Grundwortschatz Georgisch, Hamburg, Buske Verlag, 2011, 371 pages.
Thematic repertoires can be a mixed blessing for students aiming at fluency. Such glossaries tend to provide either too little or too much information, and they suffer from an inherent compulsion to flesh out their categories and subcategories with specialized terminology of dubious practical helpfulness. Liquid manure, wombats, and ignition coils should not be a priority for intermediate learners seeking to expand their vocabulary, particularly if words are being assimilated out of context. As a supplement to a well-balanced study routine, however, a competently arranged lexical repertoire can provide perspective and motivation. As it happens, in the slowly but consistently expanding market for Georgian learning resources two such publications have gone to print in recent times. Both have merits and deserve to be examined.
One of them, Vocabulaire géorgien pour l’autoformation, was a quite unexpected and pleasant surprise (actually more like a miracle). The book is part of a print-on-demand collection of bilingual repertoires that can be obtained from the publisher’s website in a great variety of linguistic pairings, now including French-Chechen. In my experience, such resources are usually computer-generated from databases and hardly ever proofread, which results in all manners of blunders, grammatical mismatches, and semantic misalignments. In this particular case, however, a competent if anonymous hand must have been at work on the “manuscript”, as no blatant mistakes could be detected, and potential ambiguities resulting from the peculiarities of either language have been intelligently taken care of.
The repertoire consists of about 9000 individual entries arranged in 256 thematic categories, which is certainly respectable. Each line consists of a French word, its Georgian counterpart in mkhedruli, and a transliteration in Latin characters. Repetitions happen, but typos are surprisingly rare. Of verbs, only the mazdar is given, which is obviously insufficient for all practical intents, but not entirely inadequate for purposes of self-testing or rote memorization. All in all, this dignified word list will prove more useful and occasionally more challenging than even an advanced student of the language would care to admit. It comes with no academic credentials to speak of, but it is solid, reliable enough, and not pasted from Google Translate – which is plenty. Additionally, how ironic!, this self-produced edition is currently the only decent resource for the study of Georgian currently available in French. A crying shame, considering the unique role that France has played in the history of the Georgian diaspora!
A honest, practical, no-frills addition to one’s library.
***
Abuladze and Ludden’s Grundwortschatz Georgisch [Core Vocabulary of Georgian] plays in quite another league. In fact, it is easily the best thematic glossary I have ever encountered and the most useful learning resource to come out of the 21st century German nouvelle vague of kartvelian studies. More selective in scope than its more rustic French counterpart (it covers about 3.800 words), it is exceptionally rich in information. Not only was it written with a motivated student in mind (the Vocabulaire géorgien is much more amorphous and quelconque), but it was obviously conceived by people who know what a learner needs, what difficulties he faces, and what precautions can boost his learning experience.
Words and concepts have been purposefully selected to cover the spectrum of the situations, emotions, objects, and spatial-temporal relationships that fall within the scope of intermediate to advanced conversation about real-life experience. One would be hard pressed to point out a superfluous or ludicrous entry. No liquid manure or ignition coils in here. To get angry, to be late, to lie, to sit, to hang from a wall, to borrow, to pass an exam… The authors do not just provide a mere word for another word, leaving the reader to fend for himself, but actually show and teach him how these states of things are best described and talked about in Georgian.
They do so by supplementing each entry with one or more practical examples, and some examples they are! While the sentences are short and simple enough to be readable without too much dictionary-thumping (a German translation is always provided anyway), they are packed to the brim with useful syntax, additional vocabulary, notable verbal forms, quotable utterances, recurring patterns, and idiomatic constructions. Exceptional care must have gone into the crafting and balancing of this apparatus. Not only do these sentences “ring true”, unlike the usually stilted scraps of conversation found in language textbooks, but they have been meticulously engineered to provide at all times an extra bit of insight or information to suit all needs. “Wow, so this is how you really say this!” Or, more realistically: “Eureka, so this is what I should have said instead!”
All verb entries are accompanied by four or five such propositions, each of them illustrating one of the major tense-aspect-mood patterns of the Georgian verbal system (and its inherent syntax) in a sort of applied and not merely abstract paradigm. Again, useful knowledge is squeezed into every clause. This goes a long way beyond the “mazdar-for-infinitive” approach, reaching deep into the living territory of how a language is actually spoken. Should one for some reason memorize these 5000+ examples, or learn how to produce equally idiomatic utterances for each given situation, his command of the language would be just about complete. Then it would make sense to have a conversation about wombats (or not).
A thematic vocabulary that is a genuine pleasure to read and will prove an enduring source of challenge and information for even a fairly experienced kartvelologist. In fact, the grammar and rhetoric of everyday conversation are probably the most imperfectly documented aspect of the language so far, and this Grundwortschatz Georgisch does a good job of providing useful drills and authentically sounding specimens of how Georgian natives think linguistically.
Here is a randomly selected instance.
თარო, “shelf”, is exemplified as follows:
რას გიდევს ამ თაროზე?
“What is lying-for-your-benefit [i.e. you have lying] on that shelf?”
in plain English:
“What do your keep on that shelf?
The entry for დივანი, “sofa”, comes with the following sentence:
ჩვენი კატა დივანზეა მოკალათებული
“Our cat is lying curled up on the sofa”
Both verbs revolve around the notion of “lying on a flat surface”, but Georgian encodes each situation in grammatically, syntactically, and semantically unrelated ways depending on the way the item is actually weighing on the surface: whether it is inanimate or animate, serving a purpose or not, just being there or intentionally resting etc. One strikes such gold at every page.
If you can handle German and are serious about mastering the subtleties of Georgian, especially if you are facing the tough transition from intermediate to advanced without the guidance of a teacher, you should definitely consider purchasing a copy!
dardimandi 