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TRANSLITERATION AND PRONUNCIATION KEY

The Georgian language has several uniąue features that make its words difficult to incorporate into an English-language text. First, transliteration is necessary. Second, it contains a senes of sounds that are not found in any Western European language and that are difficult to explain to a non-linguist. Third, its consonant-to-vowel ratio is quite high, so that words can seem daunting for the reader to try to pronounce. Consider, for example, the Georgian word for “sixteen,” teqvsmet 7. The center part of the word has four consonants in a row, and each one must be pronounced separately without the addition of vowel sounds.

To aid the reader, I am including a transliteration and pronunciation chart, based on the system endorsed by the Georgian govemment. The Georgian National System occasionally uses two Latin characters for a single one in Georgian, but the result renders a close approximation of the sound of the Georgian language. The pronunciation guide is largely borrowed from Howard Aronson’s Georgian: A Reading Grammar (1989). Where equivalent sounds could not be identified in a Western European language, I have included Aronson’s linguistic description of the sound. According to my own observations, the glottalized voiceless stops are pronounced with a tiny, explosive puff of air; the voiced fricative gh sounds like the French r, but morę guttural; and the glottalized q sounds like a person is choking. I cannot think of a morę elegant-sounding way to explain the last sound. Georgian is not a very heavily accented language, but generally there is a slight emphasis placed on the first syllable.

In the text of this dissertation I have placed transliterations of quotations in footnotes so that Georgianists can check the accuracy of my translations. The Georgian character set does