შემომეჭამა
she-mo-me-JA-mo
I accidentally ate the whole thing
Georgian grammar lets the verb take the blame.
The construction implies it happened to you rather than that you did it.
The archive
Georgian
Eight consonants in a row
Its own family, its own alphabet, and clusters of consonants that other languages would break into syllables.
FamilyKartvelian › Georgian
ScriptGeorgian
Speakers4M 4M native · 300k second
Weeks to a working level44 Counted from English. It is the Foreign Service Institute's figure for someone starting from English and from nothing.
The first hundred words cover46.5% and the first thousand 68.7%
- Gvbrdgvnis is a real word. Eight consonants before you reach a vowel, and native speakers do not consider it hard.
- The alphabet has no capital letters and no relation to any other script. Three historical versions of it are on the UNESCO heritage list.
- The verb agrees with the subject and the object at once, and which one takes which ending changes depending on the tense.
- No grammatical gender, and no articles.
- Its family, Kartvelian, has four members and they are all spoken in and around Georgia. It is related to nothing else.
An alphabet like vine tendrils, verbs that conjugate in four dimensions, and a wine culture eight thousand years old. Nothing about it resembles anything you know. The supra, a feast with a toastmaster and rules, is the best dinner format ever invented, and it runs entirely in Georgian.
Words with no translation
შემოგევლე
she-mo-GEV-le
May I circle around you: I would take your suffering onto myself.
Shemogevle: let me circle around you, taking your troubles onto myself. A Georgian endearment that offers to absorb someone's misfortune, said as easily as darling and meant more.
Where to practise it
Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak Georgian with.
The Georgian Passepartout is not out yet
Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.
Leaving takes one click.
Stories in Georgian
Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.