The Georgian Alphabet and the Arabic Alphabet

The Arabic alphabet is a script used as the basis for the writing systems of many languages, including Arabic, Persian, and, up until the 1920s, Turkish. Given that peoples speaking these languages have conquered various parts of Georgia many times, it’s somewhat surprising that the Arabic alphabet has never been used systematically to write the Georgian language. I would have thought that at least the Muslim Adjarans would have written Georgian in Arabic letters, but as far as I can tell, this has never been widely done.

So I considered this problem: how would I write Georgian using the Arabic alphabet? Here’s what I came up with:

Mashtots and Me

The Armenian alphabet, legend has it, was invented by a monk named Mesrop Mashtots (Մեսրոպ Մաշտոց, მესროპ მაშტოც). Legend also has it that Mesrop Mashtots invented the Georgian alphabet and the Caucasian Albanian alphabet as well. I don’t believe that second part of the legend, and even the details of the first part are iffy. But regardless of the particulars, the Caucasus is a grammatological wonder, and Mesrop Mashtots stands as an avatar for its diversity of scripts. So if you love different alphabets — and I do — you have to love Mesrop Mashtots. With this in mind, I made it a goal on my recent trip to Armenia to take pictures with as many statues of Mesrop Mashtots as I could. I didn’t get all of them, but I got a few. Here they are. [Note: Not long ago I started using an image-editing program. I may have gone past the bounds of good taste in some places.]

The most dramatic of all Mesrop Mashtots statues is the one in front of the Matenadaran, a.k.a. the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts in Yerevan. Around five meters tall (15-20 ft.), it shows Mesrop sitting stately with Koriun, his loving student and biographer, kneeling by his side.

Sayat-Nova

Sayat-Nova (Սայաթ-Նովա, საიათნოვა, Саят-Нова) was an Armenian troubadour poet and musician. He is an important figure in the history of Armenian literature, but he composed songs in all the major languages of the South Caucasus and maintained friendly relations with Georgians and Azeris. For this reason, it has become something of a cliche in writings about the South Caucasus to invoke Sayat-Nova as a symbol of peace and ethnic neighborliness. Besides his intrinsic importance, Sayat-Nova was also the quasi-subject of Sergei Parajanov’s brilliant film The Color of Pomegranates.

Sayat-Nova as portrayed by Georgian actress Sofiko Chiaureli in The Color of Pomegranates

The Armenian Alphabet: Pictures and Miscellanea

The Armenian alphabet is an alphabet used mostly for writing the Armenian language, though it has occasionally been used for other languages. It looks strange to me, like a cross between the Georgian alphabet and the Arabic alphabet. I don’t know if there’s any objective sense in which individual Armenian letters are actually harder to read than Georgian ones, but because of its distinct upper and lower cases, Armenian writing as a whole is probably objectively harder to learn than Georgian.

The Armenian alphabet with Eastern and Western transliterations (I think “fort” indicates aspiration rather than ejectivity)

The Georgian Lari Sign

The National Bank of Georgia has just announced that the Georgian lari will now have its own symbol. It looks like the euro symbol rotated ninety degrees clockwise, but in fact it is based on a form of the Georgian letter L (ლ). There is no word on how long it is expected to take for the symbol to become widely used in Georgia or elsewhere.

INRI, ΙΝΒΙ…ႨႬႫჀ

When Jesus was crucified, so the story goes, Pontius Pilate affixed a sign to the cross which read “JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS” . On most crucifixes, this mocking title is represented by initials on a sign over Jesus’s head. On Catholic crucifixes, the sign says INRI, short for the Latin Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum; on most Orthodox crucifixes, the sign says ΙΝΒΙ, short for the Greek Iesous ho Nazoraios ho Basileus ton Ioudaion (Ἰησοῦς ὁ Ναζωραῖος ὁ Bασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων).

Georgians, on the other hand, use their own language: ႨႬႫჀ (INMH), for Iesu Nazareveli Meupey Huriatay (იესუ ნაზარეველი მეუფჱ ჰურიათაჲ).

Another Theory on the Origin of the Georgian Alphabet

UPDATE Nov 5, 2015: It’s come to my attention that some people have taken this post to be about a serious theory on the origin of the Georgian alphabet. It’s not. It’s about a kooky, nutball theory. Developed by Zurab Kapianidze — philologist, thespian, member of Georgian parliament — the theory deals entirely with the asomtavruli script (the oldest form of the Georgian alphabet), but in a bizarre and borderline insane way. Although I shouldn’t have to say this, I don’t endorse this idea at all.

If you want to see what I actually think about the origin of the Georgian alphabet, check out this post. That said, if you want a fun-but-crazy theory about where the Georgian alphabet came from, read on.

The modern mkhedruli script superimposed over their corresponding asomtavruli letters.

The Origin of the Georgian Alphabet

The origin of the Georgian alphabet is controversial. Whereas the Roman and Greek alphabets are the results of slow and gradual transformations of older scripts (rather than of deliberate creation), the Georgian alphabet shows up in history pretty much out of nowhere. This makes it plausible that it was invented, either by one person or several. So the obvious question is: who did it?

Historical tradition gives two conflicting answers. The first comes from a medieval Georgian chronicle called “The Lives of the Kings of Kartli.” It tells of Parnavaz, the first Kartlian king, who reigned in the third century BC. Among other exploits, the chronicle has it that Parnavaz devised the Georgian “script” (მწიგნობრობა, mtsignobroba). Some have interpreted this to mean that he developed the Georgian alphabet, but mtsignobroba can also mean “literacy” or simply “writing.” This writing could have been writing in the Georgian alphabet, but more likely it was writing in the Aramaic alphabet, which at the time was the script of the Persians. This is confirmed by archeology, which has found pre-Christian traces of the Aramaic alphabet in Georgia, but none of the Georgian. Georgian schoolchildren are taught this story.

The gift shop of the Georgian National Museum sells coffee mugs depicting the old Georgian alphabet. The mugs state that the alphabet was created in the 3rd century BC. I tried explaining (in Georgian) to the gift shop worker that this is not correct, but I don’t think I convinced her.

The Georgian Alphabet: A Gallery of Specimens

The Georgian alphabet is an alphabet used in Georgia and (with minor exceptions) nowhere else. To most people, it looks like a fake alphabet, like something invented for a movie. Actually, most people don’t know that the Georgian alphabet exists — they assume (as I myself once did) that Georgia, like Kazakhstan and other former Soviet countries, uses Cyrillic. But if they did know about it, they would find it to be a headache-inducing jumble of squiggles.

The Georgia alphabet with my preferred Latinization scheme

Georgian Money

A strange thing about the currency here is that it features a lot of English writing. Consider the non-deer side of the twenty tetri coin (100 tetris in a lari):

The top part of the coin says, in the Georgian alphabet, sakartvelos respublika. Now, it would not be surprising if this same phrase were written below in the Latin alphabet since, after all, nobody outside of Georgia has the faintest idea of how to read Georgian. That would be simple transliteration. This is not the case here. We see, translated into English (and not into Russian), Republic of Georgia.

If the use of English were limited just to this, it would not be worth remarking, but there are more extreme cases. Take a look at the five lari bill:

It doesn’t actually say “depositphotos.” This is just the best image I could find on Google.

I find it bizarre that the map on this bill should be in English. The Georgian names for Russia and Turkey and Azerbaijan are almost the same in English (ruseti, turketi, and azerbaijani respectively), and the literal translation for the Georgian name for the Black Sea literally does mean “Black Sea.” Fair enough. But the Georgian name for Armenia is Somkheti, which of course is not similar at all. Thus this bill features a word which is not only printed in a foreign alphabet, but is entirely foreign altogether. It seems to me that this must be very alienating to Georgians. Imagine if our money looked like this:

I can’t even remember what this alphabet is called, but it’s not Hindi.

On the other hand, the American one dollar bill features a floating eyeball, so who am I to criticize?