Two thematic repertoires of Georgian vocabulary

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.

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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 21^st 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!

H. Fähnrich et al., Georgische Verben (2013)

Heinz Fähnrich, Nana Odischelidse, Natia Reineck, Georgische Verben (mit deutschen Entsprechungen und Satzbeispielen), 3 vols., Aachen, Shaker Verlag, 2013, 2580 pages.

Spoiler alert: with the obvious exception of Tschenkeli’s works, this is by far the best money I ever spent on a Georgian resource (and heaven knows I have not been sparing in that department). These three sturdy, information-packed, azure-covered tomes may be quite a splurge for some (they currently retail at 119 €), but to the serious-minded student or the professional scholar of kartveliana – all two and a half of them! – they will be worth every cent. In fact, I can’t suppress a shiver of excitement and gratitude for their very existence any time I pick one up, which is often.

Up until now, advanced learners who had outgrown the stage of mere glossaries and lexica would fall prey to feelings of disorientation, bewilderment, and insecurity as soon as they attempted to tackle original sources without the help of a native teacher: existing dictionaries do a fairly good job of covering nouns and adjectives, but we have been sorely lacking an adequate and handy presentation of the Georgian verbal corpus, whose hair-rising complexity is deservedly notorious. More often than not, one would find himself stuck, uncomfortably puzzling over the origin and meaning of some mysterious pluperfect or relational form.

As far as dictionaries go, some lexicographers have indexed verbs by their so-called mazdar, a sort of peculiarly Georgian infinitive-cum-deverbal, which is a compact but rather inefficient way of conveying information about the way a particular verb and its manifold variations are going to behave in practice, morphologically and syntactically.

Others, replicating the pattern of Arnold Čikobava’s monumental Kartuli enis ganmart’ebiti leksik’oni (KEGL), have listed each form individually, as a separate dictionary entry, ordering the material alphabetically by prefix or pre-radical vowel. In such cases, verbs are generally found at the third person singular of the future, from which most present and past forms can be inferred within reasonable margins of predictability. This approach has its merits, but it can be confusing, as it breaks down what is more aptly conceived of as a tightly knit semantic and morphological continuum into unrelated bits of information, and therefore fails to convey a synoptic and organic overview of a verbal entity’s manifold permutations and possibilities. Additionally, this approach is sometimes impractical when verbs exhibit phenomena of ablaut or stem alternation in the aorist-optative and perfect-pluperfect series.

The most expedient solution so far, according to experience, is Kita Tschenkeli’s choice to collect and arrange verbal forms encyclopedically by their root. In his classic three-volume Georgian-German dictionary, each entry is structured as a small microcosm of verbal forms that share the same radical DNA. These forms, in turn, are arranged in a hierarchical and systematic fashion, allowing the author to cover the entire spectrum of directional, aspectual, referential, and grammatical possibilities. The practical drawback of this approach, whose scholarly merits are invaluable, is in the overwhelming mass of densely typeset information through which one has to wade in order to find the particular form they were looking up.

This is where Georgische Verben comes in. While technically speaking Heinz Fähnrich and his co-authors have followed quite closely in Tschenkeli’s wake, whose taxonomic principles they wholeheartedly embrace, they do improve to some extent on their predecessor’s contribution by injecting some air and typographic user-friendliness into the Wörterbuch’s dauntingly compact template. The principle is roughly the same: verbal forms are listed under their root and arranged alphabetically within grammatical groups and subgroups (transitive, reflexive, passive, relational, inversive etc.). For each sub-entry – that is, each “verb” – a complete paradigm is provided (present, future, aorist, perfect) and a bilingual example is added to clarify usage. The authors have aimed for inclusiveness: whereas the open-ended combinatory mechanics of the kartvelian verb defy a “complete” classification of any sort, one would be safe to assume that hardly any form even occasionally found in reputable usage will be missing from this survey. Under წერ- (write) alone, 62 individual verbs are listed and duly clarified. The very elegance and logical cogency of the material’s arrangement and presentation invites random page-turning and makes for exciting discoveries, which is sensational for a work this barren and technical.

Another piece of good news, as I have ascertained to my immeasurable relief after deciding to fork out the appropriate amount of dough in the absence of relevant information, is that the three volumes do not contain a single ounce of fat. Far from being artificially blown up with repetitious and largely superfluous conjugations tables, as is often the case with systematic resources of this kind, the 2580 pages of this magnum opus are literally packed with unique, essential, synthetic, and useful information about pretty much every verbal form that has or may claim a right of citizenship in written Georgian.

I have never quite understood what the purpose of verb-table books ought to be: a student who finds any use for semantically advanced material will probably have no need to have those verbs conjugated in all tenses and moods for him; and vice versa, a beginner or intermediate learner who needs his hand held through the intricacies of the Georgian verbal system may struggle to savor the delights of sartorial or agricultural vocabulary. Either way, with few interesting exceptions, mere ballast inevitably tends to prevail.

In more ways than one, Fähnrich’s Georgische Verben is to the Georgian verb what Daum and Schenk’s Russische Verben has been to consecutive generations of German-speaking Slavic scholars: the go-to grimoire, the ultimate reference, the must-have enchiridion of aspectual and semantic subtleties, a watershed between amateurs and pros. In fact, Russian verbs are by far more stable, transparent, and self-explanatory than their erratic and meandering Georgian counterparts, making this work immeasurably more helpful in practice than any other specimen of the kind. The psychological relief it provides is dramatic: at long last, one feels that no matter what kind of text he is attempting to read, his back will be covered; that the answer, or hints to an answer, will unfailingly be found somewhere in the book. No more staring at weird aorists or perfects in the vain attempt to reconstruct the verb’s dictionary form! No more guessing at what a certain directional prefix does to a verb’s meaning in that particular context! Over a year into using this book every day, I cannot imagine myself not having it on my desk, or even remotely considering myself an expert of Georgian without owning this magic open-sesame. Alas, one needs to be a little more than conversant with the subtleties of the German language to get enough mileage out of it, but it is common knowledge that at least since Tschenkeli, one has to be a consummated Germanist to be a Kartvelologist.

Now for some of my reservations. They are minor, but possibly worth mentioning. One of them concerns the lack of all paratexts: there is no preface, no bibliography, no elevator pitch, no appendix, no attempt to argue for the inclusion or exclusion of particular information. I do like a laconic, no-nonsense, hands-on reference work, but  this is taking it a little too far, especially when one considers that we are dealing with the verb dictionary to end all verb dictionaries, at least for Georgian. Some context would have been appreciated.

Another drawback, much more awkward in practice, is in the lack of cross-referencing between apophonic and standard forms of each given verbal root (to say nothing of suppletive stems). This is a noticeable step back from Tschenkeli in terms of user-friendliness. Particularly when single-vowel or no-vowel stems are involved. Whereas Tschenkeli was obliging enough to redirect the reader when disambiguation or  a hint were required (“ყარ¹ siehe ყოლ; ყარ² siehe ყრ”), in this case you just have to know beforehand that, say, თმინ- derives from თმენ-, that ყოლ- should be looked up under ყლ-, and that the ყოლ- in (მო)აყოლებს (“he narrates”) is just not the ყოლ- in (ა)აყოლებს (“he assigns X to Y as an escort”, “he causes X to accompany Y”). In other words, beginners might find the break-in process a little daunting at times. It takes a fair degree of ear training and familiarity with the patterns of vowel alternation across the three Georgian tense-mood series to really get going. In many an instance, I have found myself double-checking a stem in Tschenkeli’s generously cross-referenced root repertoires before I attempted to fish for the right entry in Fähnrich.

A third setback, quite excusable for a practically-minded translator but possibly troublesome for a corpus linguist or a language historian, concerns the examples, most of which are quite obviously lifted from Georgian literary classics (I have recognized more than one excerpt), but whose authors and sources are never cited. This is all the more surprising as many of those sentences appear to be borrowed from the KEGL, where author names are black on white. This is a letdown, because a wealth of important implications can be inferred from the spatial and temporal coordinates of a mere person’s name: Georgian is a diachronically stable but regionally highly volatile language, and whether an author hails from the mountainous North or the sunny seaside, or whether he is writing in the long czarist century on in high-Soviet times, is not at all immaterial to the stylistically and culturally informed decipherment of a verbal form. I know I am grateful for the KEGL’s slightly more detailed presentation!

Finally, the sheer amount of available data might discourage even a motivated learner, as no attempt whatsoever has been made to discriminate between rare and only theoretically viable forms and frequently recurring mainstays of everyday Georgian talk. In other words, no details are provided as to frequency, rhetorical register, and other such parameters. A respectable choice, but one that undermines the didactic potential of the work: buried in a sea of minor nuances lie a few hundred fixed forms and ossified special meanings (ეტყობა, etc.) that it might have been expedient to highlight typographically or collect in an appendix for the student to learn right away, in bulk. Idioms and special collocations, too, have to be gleaned haphazardly from the token sentences, when they happen to feature one, which compares rather unfavorably to the KEGL.

This is slightly problematic, too, for meanings are occasionally attributed to verbs as a part of their core semantic spectrum that only have a reason to exist within specific idioms. For example the verb დაიწერს, “he will write in his own interest”, is translated among other things on p. 2162 as “er heiratet” (he gets married), ostensibly in view of the expression ჯვარს დაიწერს, “he will trace a cross for his own benefit”, which is a synonym of დაქორწინდება, “he will get married”. More often than not, after this fashion, illustrative sentences are used to explore uncharted idiomatic depths, which is immediately apparent and fairly useful to the expert user, but might confuse a novice. A line or two to this effect in a preface or a usage guide would have not been too many.

These cursory observations should by no means detract from an enthusiastic appreciation of this resource, whose appearance in print constitutes a major landmark in kartvelian studies. Yet another testament to Heinz Fähnrich’s indefatigable contribution to the field, Georgische Verben is nothing short of exciting. While, at a stretch, the bulk of the raw information it provides could theoretically be milked or inferred from Tschenkeli or Donald Rayfield’s Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary, the comfort of use, dependability, precision, and thoroughness of these three volumes powerfully contribute to end the pioneer era of karvelology. At last, enough professional resources exist for Georgian to be dealt with competently from the vantage point of adequate scholarship. For a translator such as myself, this is where the going gets tough!