1. The language of Georgia
2. British architecture from the reigns of King George I to IV.
3. Poetic style from the reign of George V.
The language of Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains is the main member of the small Kartvelian (or South Caucasian) family. They have no known connexion with any languages outside the Caucasus.

Georgian is written in the Mkhedruli or military script; there was also another called the Khutsuri or ecclesiastical. This is a simple alphabet of 33 letters, namely A B G D E V Z T I K' L M N O P' ZH R S T' U P K GH Q SH CH TS DZ TS' CH' KH J H. (Several other obsolete letters are added when the letters are used as numbers.)

The difference between T and T', and likewise with K' P' CH' and TS', is that the apostrophe indicates an ejective sound, one made with a simultaneous glottal stop. The other one of the pair is aspirated, that is has a slight H sound after it. Confusingly, sometimes in place name transcriptions this convention is reversed, and T' is used for the aspirated, T for the ejective. The letter Q is also ejective, and Georgian has no aspirated (or voiced) version; however, the closely related language Mingrelian has distinct Q and Q'.

Georgian is notorious for its consonant clusters, as in

  • zghva = 'sea'
  • ts'qnari = 'quiet'
  • tskheni = 'horse'
  • msgavsad = 'similar'
  • psk'eri = 'bottom'
  • Tbilisi, the capital
  • khelmdzghvaneli = 'leader'
  • t'qviamprkvevi = 'gun'

Not all clusters are permitted. There is an agreement rule for oral stops: they have to agree in phonation (aspirated, ejective, or voiced) if they move from front to back in place of articulation. So ts'k', tsk, dzg are permitted, but not ts'k, tsg, dzk' etc. But tb in Tbilisi is permitted because the stops move from back to front. The restriction does not apply if another consonant intervenes. In tabular form the following consonants are affected:

     p   t   ts   ch   k
     p'  t'  ts'  ch'  k'   q
     b   d   dz   j    g

Grammatically the verb is very complicated, with many suppletive and irregular forms to memorize.

Nouns have case forms but these are fairly regular. The plural is formed with -eb-, as tskhenebi 'horses'. It has an ergative case in -ma, but how the subject and other parts of a sentence are marked depends on the tense and mood, perfect and present and future having different systems.

This tense/mood complex is called in English a 'screeve', from the Georgian mskrivi 'row'.

The numerals one to ten are erti, ori, sami, otkhi, khuti, ekvsi, shvidi, rva, tskhra, ati.

The native name for the language is Kartuli ena. A Georgian person is Kartveli, and the country is Sakartvelo.

Stress is weak, and usually antepenultimate. But many surnames end in -dze or -vili, and with both of these stress is penultimate, as in President Eduard ShevardNAdze.

A neo-classical style of architecture predominant in Britain in the reigns of the first four Georges, 1714-1820. Not only was it beautifully proportioned, it exemplifies elegance and restraint, in contrast to the baroque, rococo, Victorian, and imperial styles before it, after it, and on other countries. They knew what size people were, and built to that size.

Large parts of London and Edinburgh and especially the World Heritage city of Bath have big sweeping sections of Georgian squares, rows, and crescents, as if mass produced, yet keeping their artistic character all the more in the mass.

The term Georgian is also applied to a fairly quiet, pastoral school of English poetry in the early part of the reign of George V (1910-1936), as opposed to the experimentation of modernism and imagism. Leading Georgian poets were Walter de la Mare, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke. The movement, a reaction to high Victorianism, was obscured by the revolution started by the publication of The Waste Land in 1922.

(For your convenience, all Georgian and Greek characters in this writeup are in transliteration, except when necessary to show character shapes. When Georgian characters are used, they are in the Khutsuri script, which Unicode misleadingly refers to as `uppercase'.)

The Georgian language has had three major scripts. The first, Asomtavruli ("capital letter", also known as Mrglovani "rounded"), is first recorded in the 5th century, and is now more or less extinct. Khutsuri (ecclesiastical) appeared about 400 years later, and appears to be a more angular form of Asomtavruli. Mkhedruli, or "soldier's" script, appeared in the thirteenth century, and eventually replaced Khutsuri in secular use. Khutsuri continued to be used in ecclesiastical contexts long after it had fallen into secular disuse---compare with Glagolitic and Cyrillic. Mkhedruli resembles a cursive form of Khutsuri, though some characters changed siginificantly.

While Georgian is not Indo-European, its scripts share features with Greek, indicating likely borrowing. The character forms of Khutsuri and Asomtavruli are in a few cases quite similar to their Greek counterparts:

  • P (: par/phar) is very similar to Greek phi (Φ)
  • K (: kar/khar) resembles Greek chi (&Chi), rotated 45 degrees
  • O (: on) looks like Greek omicron (Ο) with a tail

Also note that G, E, and V (gan, en, vin), though they do not immediately resemble their Greek counterparts, are very similar to one another. Recall the similarities among Greek gamma, epsilon, and digamma/waw: Ⴂ Ⴄ Ⴅ vs Γ Ε Ϝ.

The alphabet may be derived from a cursive Greek script, though I have no evidence of this at the moment. Others have suggested that the Georgian scripts are based in part on Middle Iranian.

There was, however, almost certainly some direct or indirect Greek influence on the early Georgian alphabet. Observe, for example, the order of the two (brackets indicating more or less obsolete characters):

  • A B G D E V Z (EY/Ē) T I K' L M N (Y) O P' ZH R S T' (WI/Ü) U P K GH Q' SH CH TS DZ TS' CH' KH Q J H (OW/Ō) -- Georgian
  • A B G D E (W) Z Ē TH I K L M N X O P (TS) (Q) R S T Y PH KH PS Ō -- Greek

Of course, Georgian has many more phonemes than Greek, and thus needs more letters to represent them all. The similarity of the common part, however, is much too strong to ignore.

Consider the correlation between the three series of obstruents in Greek (B, P, PH; D, T, TH; and G, K, KH) and the characters in corresponding positions in the Georgian alphabets. Note that:

  • Georgian voiced stops (B, G, D) correspond to Ancient Greek voiced stops (B, G, D). In Greek these later became voiced fricatives.
  • Georgian ejectives (P', K', T') correspond to voiceless unaspirated stops (P, K, T).
  • Georgian aspirates (P, K, T) correspond to Ancient Greek aspirates (PH, KH, TH). In Greek, these later became voiceless fricatives.

This may indicate that the borrowing happened when Greek TH, PH, KH were still aspirated stops. However, the first known occurrence of a Georgian alphabet (Asomtavruli) dates to about 430CE, by which time the Greek aspirate and voiced stops were already fricative.

One possibility is that the script was explicitly based on an obsolete version of Greek. Note that Georgian V is where Greek once had digamma (thanks to Gritchka for pointing this out). Digamma, also known as waw, was pronounced `w' or `v', so this makes sense. Georgian ZH takes up the space once occupied in Greek by san/sampi; the pronunciation of san is somewhat unclear. Likewise, the obsolete Georgian Y and Greek xi stand in the same position, though there was nothing in common between their sounds. Interestingly, the Gothic alphabet, which is definitely derived from Greek and is about 50 years older, has `j' (pronounced like english `y') in the same position.

In Unicode, Georgian is allocated the range U10A0-U10FF. This range includes both the Mkhedruli and Khutsuri scripts, as well as some obsolete Mkhedruli characters.

Sources and references:

  • Omniglot (http://omniglot.com/writing/georgian.htm)
  • Gritchka, private conversation
  • `Greek Alphabet', Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Greek_alphabet)
  • The Georgian Language (http://www.armazi.demon.co.uk/georgian/)
  • `The Armenian alphabet and Georgian scripts compared with the Greek and the Hebrew alphabet' (http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/didact/caucasus/geoarmsc.pdf)

The Georgian script is used primarily for writing the Georgian language. Upper- and lowercase pairs exist primarily in archaic forms of the script.

The modern Georgian script is a lowercase style called Mkhedruli (soldier's). It originated as the secular derivative of a form called Khutsuri (ecclesiastical) that had both uppercase and lowercase pairs. Although no longer used in most modern texts, the Khutsuri style is still used for liturgical purposes; the Unicode standard encodes the uppercase form of Khutsuri as well as the lowercase letters of modern Georgian.

The Georgian paragraph separator has a distinct representation, so it has been separately encoded as U+10FB. It visually marks a paragraph end, but it must be followed by a formatting character such as U+2029 paragraph separator to cause a paragraph break.

For the Georgian full stop, use U+0589 Armenian full stop.

Unicode's Georgian code block reserves the 96 code points from U+10A0 to U+10FF, of which 83 are currently assigned.

Myanmar <-- Georgian --> Hangul Jamo

Number of characters added in each version of the Unicode standard :
Unicode 1.1 : 78
Unicode 3.2 : 2
Unicode 4.1 : 3

Number of characters in each General Category :

Letter, Uppercase   Lu : 38
Letter, Modifier    Lm :  1
Letter, Other       Lo : 43
Punctuation, Other  Po :  1

All the characters in this code block are in bidirectional category Left To Right L

The columns below should be interpreted as :

  1. The Unicode code for the character
  2. The character in question
  3. The Unicode name for the character
  4. The Unicode General Category for the character
  5. The Unicode version when this character was added




     Capital letters (Khutsuri)
This is the uppercase of the old ecclesiastical alphabet. The style shown in the code charts is known as Asomtavruli. See the Georgian Supplement block for lowercase Nuskhuri.

U+10A0   Ⴀ   Georgian capital letter an Lu 1.1
U+10A1   Ⴁ   Georgian capital letter ban Lu 1.1
U+10A2   Ⴂ   Georgian capital letter gan Lu 1.1
U+10A3   Ⴃ   Georgian capital letter don Lu 1.1
U+10A4   Ⴄ   Georgian capital letter en Lu 1.1
U+10A5   Ⴅ   Georgian capital letter vin Lu 1.1
U+10A6   Ⴆ   Georgian capital letter zen Lu 1.1
U+10A7   Ⴇ   Georgian capital letter tan Lu 1.1
U+10A8   Ⴈ   Georgian capital letter in Lu 1.1
U+10A9   Ⴉ   Georgian capital letter kan Lu 1.1
U+10AA   Ⴊ   Georgian capital letter las Lu 1.1
U+10AB   Ⴋ   Georgian capital letter man Lu 1.1
U+10AC   Ⴌ   Georgian capital letter nar Lu 1.1
U+10AD   Ⴍ   Georgian capital letter on Lu 1.1
U+10AE   Ⴎ   Georgian capital letter par Lu 1.1
U+10AF   Ⴏ   Georgian capital letter zhar Lu 1.1
U+10B0   Ⴐ   Georgian capital letter rae Lu 1.1
U+10B1   Ⴑ   Georgian capital letter san Lu 1.1
U+10B2   Ⴒ   Georgian capital letter tar Lu 1.1
U+10B3   Ⴓ   Georgian capital letter un Lu 1.1
U+10B4   Ⴔ   Georgian capital letter phar Lu 1.1
U+10B5   Ⴕ   Georgian capital letter khar Lu 1.1
U+10B6   Ⴖ   Georgian capital letter ghan Lu 1.1
U+10B7   Ⴗ   Georgian capital letter qar Lu 1.1
U+10B8   Ⴘ   Georgian capital letter shin Lu 1.1
U+10B9   Ⴙ   Georgian capital letter chin Lu 1.1
U+10BA   Ⴚ   Georgian capital letter can Lu 1.1
U+10BB   Ⴛ   Georgian capital letter jil Lu 1.1
U+10BC   Ⴜ   Georgian capital letter cil Lu 1.1
U+10BD   Ⴝ   Georgian capital letter char Lu 1.1
U+10BE   Ⴞ   Georgian capital letter xan Lu 1.1
U+10BF   Ⴟ   Georgian capital letter jhan Lu 1.1
U+10C0   Ⴠ   Georgian capital letter hae Lu 1.1
U+10C1   Ⴡ   Georgian capital letter he Lu 1.1
U+10C2   Ⴢ   Georgian capital letter hie Lu 1.1
U+10C3   Ⴣ   Georgian capital letter we Lu 1.1
U+10C4   Ⴤ   Georgian capital letter har Lu 1.1
U+10C5   Ⴥ   Georgian capital letter hoe Lu 1.1

This is the modern secular alphabet, which is caseless.

U+10D0   ა   Georgian letter an Lo 1.1
U+10D1   ბ   Georgian letter ban Lo 1.1
U+10D2   გ   Georgian letter gan Lo 1.1
U+10D3   დ   Georgian letter don Lo 1.1
U+10D4   ე   Georgian letter en Lo 1.1
U+10D5   ვ   Georgian letter vin Lo 1.1
U+10D6   ზ   Georgian letter zen Lo 1.1
U+10D7   თ   Georgian letter tan Lo 1.1
U+10D8   ი   Georgian letter in Lo 1.1
U+10D9   კ   Georgian letter kan Lo 1.1
U+10DA   ლ   Georgian letter las Lo 1.1
U+10DB   მ   Georgian letter man Lo 1.1
U+10DC   ნ   Georgian letter nar Lo 1.1
U+10DD   ო   Georgian letter on Lo 1.1
U+10DE   პ   Georgian letter par Lo 1.1
U+10DF   ჟ   Georgian letter zhar Lo 1.1
U+10E0   რ   Georgian letter rae Lo 1.1
U+10E1   ს   Georgian letter san Lo 1.1
U+10E2   ტ   Georgian letter tar Lo 1.1
U+10E3   უ   Georgian letter un Lo 1.1
U+10E4   ფ   Georgian letter phar Lo 1.1
U+10E5   ქ   Georgian letter khar Lo 1.1
U+10E6   ღ   Georgian letter ghan Lo 1.1
U+10E7   ყ   Georgian letter qar Lo 1.1
U+10E8   შ   Georgian letter shin Lo 1.1
U+10E9   ჩ   Georgian letter chin Lo 1.1
U+10EA   ც   Georgian letter can Lo 1.1
U+10EB   ძ   Georgian letter jil Lo 1.1
U+10EC   წ   Georgian letter cil Lo 1.1
U+10ED   ჭ   Georgian letter char Lo 1.1
U+10EE   ხ   Georgian letter xan Lo 1.1
U+10EF   ჯ   Georgian letter jhan Lo 1.1
U+10F0   ჰ   Georgian letter hae Lo 1.1

     Archaic letters

U+10F1   ჱ   Georgian letter he Lo 1.1
U+10F2   ჲ   Georgian letter hie Lo 1.1
U+10F3   ჳ   Georgian letter we Lo 1.1
U+10F4   ჴ   Georgian letter har Lo 1.1
U+10F5   ჵ   Georgian letter hoe Lo 1.1
U+10F6   ჶ   Georgian letter fi Lo 1.1

     Additional letters for Mingrelian and Svan

U+10F7   ჷ   Georgian letter yn Lo 3.2
U+10F8   ჸ   Georgian letter elifi Lo 3.2

     Additional letters

U+10F9   ჹ   Georgian letter turned gan Lo 4.1
U+10FA   ჺ   Georgian letter ain Lo 4.1


U+10FB   ჻   Georgian paragraph separator Po 1.1

     Modifier letter

U+10FC   ჼ   modifier letter Georgian nar Lm 4.1

Some prose may have been lifted verbatim from unicode.org,
as is permitted by their terms of use at http://www.unicode.org/copyright.html
The Georgian period in Britain is generally defined as when the House of Brunswick originating from Hanover ruled Britain, excluding the reign of Queen Victoria. It is marked as a period that saw political reform, arising from the dramatic social and economic effects of the agrarian and industrial revolutions, and further modernising of institutions such as the military and universities. Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and the Bronte sisters would most eloquently describe life in this period as the old order reinvented itself.

The Hanoveran George I acceded to the British throne in 1714 after the death of Queen Anne, a right inherited to him by the 1701 Act of Settlement. He came to Britain and surrounded himself with German advisors and servants, although after allying himself the Protestant Whigs he generally left government up to Cabinet (particuarly Robert Walpole). George I was more interested in having a good time womanising and drinking rather than governing (or even learning English), and he much perferred living back in Hanover. While he rule the agrarian revolution took hold - small individual strip farming were merged together, dramatically improving productivity and creating a large workforce of labourers.

His son George II became King in 1727. He preferred having a greater hands on approach to government, which put him in conflict with both his father and Robert Walpole. A monarch with a passion for things military, George II led Britain down the road to war with the Spanish and then the French, while battling a Tory-inspired Jacobite insurgency led by Prince Charles Edward Stuart. He was the last British monarch to physically participate in armed conflict (at Dettingen against the French in 1743). Like his father he was ill-tempered and aggressive, although he eventually learnt to appreciate Walpole's sagacity, especially after Walpole got Britain out of conflicts of his own making.

George II rule outlasted the life of his son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, and thus when George II died in 1760 he was succeeded by his grandson. George III 'madness' (specifically porphyria) led to his erratic rule and ultimately his removal. He broke the grip the Whigs had on power and through subversion managed to fill Cabinet with servile and mediocre ministers. They evidently were not the best team to pick when dealing with the American War of Independence, although by the time the Napoleonic Wars came more capable figures like Pitt the Younger, Horatio Nelson and Arthur Wellesley were making the decisions.

At the same time, Britain was industrialising quickly, thanks to several new inventions like the steam engine, the spinning jenny and coal-fired iron smelting. Transport links were extended through canals and later railways. There was also greater call for political reform and human rights, such as unionism and the abolishment of slavery.

George IV reigned as King from 1820, although since 1811 he was effectively allowed to rule as the Prince Regent. He was known to be a strong supporter for the arts and an extravagent spender of public buildings - 'regency' architecture is coined after him. He ruled in a period of economic dislocation and transformation caused by the Napoleonic Wars, and the start of the Industrial Revolution, a time when his extravengent spending of public buildings

William IV took over in 1830 after the death of George IV, his brother. His seven year reign coincided with political upheavals in Europe, caused by the Industrial Revolution empowering the newly rich and educated over the old landed gentry. He managed to force through the House of Lords the Reform Act of 1832, the start of many bills that extended sufferage and strengthened parliamentary rule.

William IV died in 1837 without ever having children. Succession then would have gone to his brother Edward Duke of Cumberland, but he too had since died. Edward's eighteen year old daughter Victoria thus acceded to the throne.

Geor"gi*an (?), a.






© Webster 1913

Geor"gi*an, n.

A native of, or dweller in, Georgia.


© Webster 1913

Geor"gi*an (?), a.

Of or pertaining to Georgia, one of the United States.


© Webster 1913

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