by Aunt Lou

Created on: May 27, 2007   Last Updated: May 28, 2007

THE ERGATIVE CASE PARAMETER
IN GEORGIAN

I
The Georgian Language

Georgian is the official language of Georgia, a former Soviet republic situated in the Caucasus, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. It shares borders with Russia, in the North, and Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Turkey in the East and South. The entire Caucasus area, in and around the Caucasus Mountains, is less than twice the size of the United Kingdom, but a large number of languages are spoken therea larger number than can be found in almost any other area of the same size, anywhere in the world. There are Indo-European (e.g., Armenian and Ossete), Altaic (e.g., Azerbaidjani), and Semitic languages in addition to the forty or so languages of the Caucasian family, which are spoken almost exclusively in the Caucasus and are not known to be related to any of the world's other languages (Comrie 1990: 14, Crystal 1997: 307). The Caucasus has, in fact, been famous throughout history for the numbers of languages spoken there. The Arabs referred to the area as the mountain of tongues'" (Comrie 1990: 14).

There is some debate among linguists as to whether the so-called "Caucasian languages," spoken by approximately eight million people, actually form a single family of related languages; the classification may be more geographical than linguistic. There has not been enough work done on these languages, yet, to know for certain (Crystal 1997: 307). Therefore, many linguistics choose to speak of them in terms of four distinct groups that do not necessarily belong to a single larger family. These are (1) the North-West Caucasian (or Abkhazo-Adyghian) group; (2) the North Central Caucasian group; (3) the North-East Caucasian group (which includes nearly a million Chechen speakers); and (4) the Southern Caucasian (or Kartvelian) group, which is made up mostly of the various dialects of Georgian and represents more than half of the speakers of Caucasian languages, at least four million (Comrie 1990: 14, Katzner 1975: 125, Crystal 1997: 307).

The Georgians call themselves Kartvelebi (Katzner 1975: 125), and their language is the only language of the Caucasian family to have a long-standing literary tradition (Katzner 1975: 21, Crystal 1997: 307); its unique written form was invented in the fifth century A.D. (Crystal 1997: 307). It is very interesting phonetically, having large numbers of consonant clusters, as in the names of the Georgian cities Tbilisi and Mcxeta.

Perhaps the most famousor rather infamousGeorgian,

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