Georgian

Ian James
© January 2010

'Georgian Script' in Georgian

The writing system /kartuli damts’erloba/ for the South Caucasian language of Georgian emerged in the 5th century AD. The alphabet is quite remarkable. Apart from the interesting assortment of shapes it contains, the alphabet is almost perfectly phonemic.

Letters

In the first column are the original Asomtavruli capitals, in the 2nd column are the Nuskhuri miniscules of the 9th century. These two forms have been used together, in a style known as Khutsuri (ecclesiastical). The third column contains the modern alphabet, Mkhedruli, which emerged in the 11th century. The letters in blue are now obsolete. The 4th column has the pronunciation in IPA, and the 5th column has the old numerical assignments. Altogether there are 45 glyphs.
table 1 table 2 table 3

Headline script

A modern style called Mtavruli is used for titles and headings. Here, the mkhedruli letters are simply made to fit a single channel, without the distinctive ascenders and descenders.

Example

example of Georgian script
“I built a castle of despair,
I shut my anguish up inside.
From the realm of the dead they came
to look upon this citadel.

The castle they encircled tight,
but their might failed to breach the door.
Then they said: when the time will come
the door will open of itself.”

[folk poem from www.armazi.com]

Fonts used are DejaVu Serif and BPG Mikheil Stefane Um.

St.George playing polo with negative cosmic forces

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This page © Ian James - last modified Jan.21,2010