Wiktionary talk:About Georgian

Georgian nouns without final -ი

I seem to recall that there are coniditions under which nouns in Georgian can drop their final -ი but I can't remember what those conditions are. Is it when the first noun is used to qualify the second, like a kind of adjective?

And then I'd like to know if it's also possible with plural nouns so that they may sometimes appear with just a final -ებ rather than the full final -ები.

I want to know because I'm taking forever to analyse new words as nouns or verbs and what forms they might be. I'm trying to learn which patterns can only occur in nouns, which can occur only in verbs, and which are theoretically possible in both. — hippietrail (talk) 05:30, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

No, you won't find a noun w/o -ი in modern standard Georgian. The same applies to plurals. --user:Dixtosa 17:42, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

OK thanks for that. What about with adjectives? I believe they mostly behave just like nouns when talking about inflection. — hippietrail (talk) 03:59, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Adjectives can only be declined, so Appendix:Georgian_adjectives is kind of comprehensive.--user:Dixtosa 12:49, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Is Judeo-Georgian a separate language or a dialect?

Discussion moved from an old discussion in user-talk-space.

I've had a problem in finding any documentation on Judeo-Georgian (jge), and I'm beginning to suspect it's a phantom language. Maybe you or someone with a research library at hand could figure out whether it exists? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:16, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Well, let's review what is known about it. Ethnologue, when they gave it a code, wrote that it "[m]ay not be a separate language from Georgian, but a dialect using various Hebrew loanwords". Other general-reference works seem to say the same thing, in more words or less. Ball's Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World states that whereas "Judeo-Tat is distinct from Muslim Tat, Judeo-Georgian is an ethnolect of Georgian like the English of American Jews for English." Haarman's Language in Ethnicity: A View of Basic Ecological Relations, after describing the unusual situation of the Jews of Georgia relative to the Jews of other former SSRs (namely that more speak Georgian than Russian), comments: "Perhaps because of these isolational characteristics, some scholars tend to stress the independence of Judeo-Georgian as a Jewish language, which, actually, in terms of linguistic affinity, is a variant of Georgian."

OTOH, Waldman, in his Recent Study of Hebrew (1989), outlines a handful of phonetic peculiarities of Judeo-Georgian, and writes that "Moskovich and Ben-Oren (1982) reject the claim that a separate Judeo-Georgian does not exist [... and] have gathered a file of more than a thousand elements of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Georgian origin that are specific to Judeo-Georgian speech." (But on the third hand, thinking back to Ball's analogy, the English of American Jews could be expected to contain many Hebrew loanwords that general American English would not.)

I have yet to find a note of which script the language uses.

- -sche (discuss) 19:23, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

In other words, it seems that the speech that evolved among the Jews in Georgia is definitely a discrete thing — "capable of being perceived individually and not as part of something else", as our entry on discrete puts it — so it's not a phantom the way e.g. some supposed Australian languages have been. (They've turned out to be town names used as names for already-known languages, without the towns even showing noticeable dialect differences.) It's just a question of whether social isolation, retention of certain old Georgian features which have disappeared from standard Georgian, a few pronunciation differences, and an influx of Hebrew loanwords qualifies it as a separate language. That could go either way. After all, "isolation, retention of certain old features which have disappeared from the standard language, a few pronunciation differences, and an influx of Native American loanwords" would describe w:Appalachian English relative to, say, standard British English. I'd still like to find which script it uses. - -sche (discuss) 03:32, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

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O knowledgeable editors of Georgian, do you think Judeo-Georgian should continue to be treated as a separate language, or should it be treated as a dialect of Georgian? - -sche (discuss) 04:13, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

This conversation predated the publishing of the Handbook of Jewish Languages, which has a chapter on Judeo-Georgian. Unfortunately, my copy is currently in another city, but @Wikitiki89 may have his copy at hand, and be able to glean from it whether or not it is a separate language. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 05:10, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

I skimmed through the chapter. It seems there are prominent prosodic, phonological, morphological, and lexical differences between Judeo-Georgian and non-Jewish Georgian. It mentioned that there are translations of various Jewish texts, such as the Haggadah and the Book of Genesis, into Judeo-Georgian, but it did not mention in which script they are written. There is also a collection of traditional poetry and folklore published in 1940, preserving the Jewish features of the language. To me it seems we should treat it as an ethnolect of Georgian and not as a separate language. --WikiTiki89 14:44, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Pinging some of our (excitingly large number of) Georgian speakers, @Dixtosa, ReordCræft, Simboyd, in case they have access to online or offline references on the matter, or can say whether or not they understand Judeo-Georgian (which would help assess its mutual intelligibility). - -sche (discuss) 15:38, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

From the chapter in the Handbook of Jewish Languages, it seemed to imply that they were very mutually intelligible. The Jews were not isolated from the Georgians, they interacted and this would presumably have prevented Judeo-Georgian from diverging beyond mutual intelligibility. --WikiTiki89 15:42, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Merged. - -sche (discuss) 23:21, 11 September 2016 (UTC)