Kartvelian Linguistics

This table began as a comparison of Etruscan words to other Indo-European words, and it is clear that the linkage to Etruscan illuminates some new patterns in Indo-European word relationships. We added for further comparison words from the Baltic group (Latvian), Kartvelian (Georgian) and Uralic (Finnish) and Basque, a "language isolate" that looks as much Indo-European as othes in the Indo-European group. For those who advocate Hurrian connections Hurrian words that are available have been added to the table.  *PIE specialists have been speculating on the idea that the three language families, Baltic, Uralic and Kartvelian may be related to Indo-European, perhaps as a super family.
  The Indo-European family of languages is believed to have originated north of the Black Sea (Pontic Region). Some scholars have indicated a Caucasus origin. Although we can't rule out borrowing among [unrelated] languages it appears from the interesting shifts that the languages in our "Indo-European Table may be one family. I found šāl-a, šali, šala (Hurrian)
ასული, asuli, daughter(Georgian); თვით, t’vit’, self (Georgian), sevi, self (Latvian), vete, (Albanian); ხუთი, khut’i, five (Georgian), пяць, piać (Belarussian), pieci (Latvian), pesë (Albanian), pente (Greek) and pajncha (Sanskrit) interesting. (The interesting relationships continue through the table. The table is alphabetically arranged via the right-hand column, Etruscan words.

Abstract : this study, which first aim was to demonstrate correspondences between Gaulish and Slavic languages, between which I found 500 common words, allowed me also to establish, on the basis of genetical, archaeological and religious data, that those correspondences were linked with ancient migrations which spread the Dravidian civilisation of the Indus Valley to Iran, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Caucasus, the North of the Black Sea, Danubian and Balkan Europe, Gaul and Iberia, where Neolithic farmers brought about 30% of the French genetic profile and contributed to the development of the megalithic civilisation which began in 5.000 BC. This also explains the linguistic correspondences I established between Gaulish and Dravidian languages – 250 common words from the 500 words I studied, as well as similarities I found in the organisation of the Society and the religion, which lead various researchers to suggest, on the basis of the diffusion of the very ancient haplogroup H2-P96 from India to Western Europe, that the first Europeans and the proto-Dravidians had a common origin.
Extrait : cette étude, dont l’objectif initial était de démontrer les correspondances entre le gaulois et les langues slaves, entre lesquelles j’ai trouvé 500 mots communs, m’a en outre permis de démontrer, sur la base de données génétiques, archéologiques et religieuses, que ces correspondances étaient liées à des migrations anciennes qui ont apporté environ 30% du profil génétique français et  diffusé la civilisation dravidienne de la vallée de l’Indus vers l’Iran, la Mésopotamie, l’Anatolie, le Caucase, le Nord de la Mer Noire, l’Europe danubienne et balkanique, la Gaule et l’Ibérie, où les agriculteurs néolithiques ont apporté environ 30% du profil génétique français et contribué à former la civilisation mégalithique qui s’est développée à partir de -5.000. Cela explique aussi les correspondances linguistiques que j’ai établies entre le gaulois et les langues dravidiennes - 250 mots communs sur les 500 mots étudiés, et les similitudes que j’ai constatées dans l’organisation de la société et la religion, qui amènent certains chercheurs à suggérer, sur la base de la diffusion du très ancien haplogroupe H2-P96 de l’Inde à l’Europe de l’Ouest, que les premiers Européens et les proto-Dravidiens avaient une origine commune.

LOS IBEROS primeros fundadores de Europa es un extracto del libro Karuo el secreto ibero, por el cual Enrique Cabrejas o Enric Cabrejas nos relata de modo llano su experiencia personal con lo extraordinario de un descubrimiento. El 21 de Abril de 2012 consiguió lo que parecía imposible: Descifrar la escritura ibérica. El hallazgo más relevante de la cultura universal en nuestro país de los últimos tiempos, sin lugar a dudas. Un hito en la historia de la escritura sin precedentes. Desde este mismo instante la obra Karuo de Enrique Cabrejas lo convierte en un referente destacado a nivel mundial en historia y lingüística. Los innumerables datos, explicaciones, pruebas y significados que nos reporta nunca conocidos antes, son una referencia obligada para todos aquellos que quieran comprender la historia, la lengua antigua e incluso también la moderna de nuestro país o para quienes en el futuro deseen estudiarla e investigarla en profundidad, más si cabe desde el mundo académico.

Etruscan, the language of the people that dominated central and northern Italy from prehistoric time until the rise of Rome, has hitherto not been entirely deciphered. The riddle posed by the nature of the tongue of the early masters of Rome remains a permanent irritant; the more so since the solution to this enigma would help shed a new light on the early history of Mediterranean civilisation. The present approach focuses on a structural comparison of Etruscan with the South-Caucasian (Kartvelian) language family. We find a complete concordance with Kartvelian of the whole system of the attested Etruscan casual terminations, but also an identity of their usage, which is so unusual and complex as to exclude any explanation by coincidence. We also find a compelling number of core cognates and the possibility of applying a typological cross-verification: by using grammatical patterns from one of the two compared systems one is able to predict similar patterns in the other.

Funde, Eigennamen und Schriftzeichen beweisen Roms lange Zugehörigkeit zur etruskischen Kultur. Die historisch faßbaren Anfänge des Etruskertums in Italien fallen mit der mythischen  Gründungzeit Roms (datiert auf 753 v. Chr.) zusammen. Die Sage berichtet vom korinthisch-etruskischen Ursprung der letzten römische Könige und von Einfällen der Etrusker unter dem König von Clusium Lars Porsenna nach dem Sturz der Tarquinier.  Die zwei römischen Gründungsmythen, die Äneas- und die Romulus-Sage, bezeugen die enge Verbindung Roms mit den etruskischen Nachbarn. Von den sieben sagenhaften Königen Roms, von Romulus bis Tarquinius Superbus, waren vier etruskischer Herkunft. Romulus ist der mythische Ahnherr der *Ruma, eines aus lat. Roma erschlossenen Geschlechternamens. Die erschlossene etruskische Form von Romulus lautet *Rumle. Von ihm leiten sich auch die Gentilizien Romulius bzw. Romilius ab. Auf die Romulii oder Romilii ist auch die erste der  sechzehn ältesten römischen Landtribus, die Romulia zurückzuführen. Remus gilt als der Ahnherr der Remmii, eines Geschlechts, das es wohl im ältesten Rom gegeben haben muß. Dem Gentilnamen liegt der etruskische Name  Rem-ne oder Rem-ni zugrunde. Von diesem Gentilizium leiten sich in und um Rom die Toponyme Rem-ona und Rem-oria her. Tyrrhener  und Römer wurden von den Griechen häufig synonym benutzt: Tyrrhenoì  è Rhomaîoi („Tyrrhener oder Römer“), ebenso wie Tyrrhenía è Italía. Einige Sprachelemente seien zusätzlich genannt: Im Etruskischen lauten die Namensbezeichnungen für Rom Ruma, für Römer Rumach, für Troja Truia, für Trojaner Truial. In der Frühzeit herrschte ein Priesterkönig (lauchme oder lochume, lat. lucumo) in jeder etruskischen Stadt, ein Titel, der möglicherweise auf die Heilskönige und Richter der nordostgeorgischen Bergstämme verweist, die häufig den Namen Luchumi trugen.

Das etruskische Erbe Roms gelangte erst Jahrhunderte später, während des Humanismus und in der Renaissance wieder zum Vorschein. Bei der Hinwendung zur Antike in der Rinascita spielte in der Toskana und in Latium, vor allem in Florenz und Viterbo, die Etruscheria, die Begeisterung für die Etrusker, eine besondere Rolle. Das Etruskertum diente als Modell gesellschaftlicher Erneuerung und fand Eingang in die kulturellen Programme der Renaissancefürsten, nicht zuletzt  der Medici. Der römische Baumeister Vitruv hatte  in seinem Augustus gewidmeten Werk De architectura  die tuskische Säulenordnung beschrieben. Diese Schrift regte die Renaissancearchitekten Andrea Palladio und Giorgio Vasari an. Der Palladianismus bildet zwei Jahrhunderte später eine der wichtigsten Stilrichtungen des Klassizismus. Durch die Lektüre von Palladio inspiriert, errichtete Thomas Jefferson sein Haus „Monticello“ mit toskanischem Portikus – die  erste toskanische Villa in der Neuen Welt.  Den Etruskern verdankt das  abendländischen Denken  schließlich  eine zentrale Kategorie – die Person.

This paper compares the expression of information structure in the three indigenous language families of the Caucasus (West Caucasian, Nakh-Daghestanian and Kartvelian) by means of the concepts of focus, contrast, topic and givenness. I concentrated on constituent order and the use of particles, thereby largely ignoring other formal means such as intonation. When comparing all three Caucasian language families we can see a number of parallels in the way information structure is expressed.
First of all, there are obvious (and expectable) similarities in the constituent order at the clause level. All three language families show a clear preference for SOV, but other orders are, in general, possible, whereby Ubykh and Laz are more rigid than the other languages (which might be due to Turkish influence on both languages). The major focus position is preverbal, but postverbal focus is also attested and although focal items are frequently positioned in adjacency to the verb this is not a strict requirement. All three language families allow for verb-initial order for presentational focus in introductory statements of narratives.
By contrast, at the phrasal level we find a sharp difference between West Caucasian with its prenominal and postnominal modifiers as well as nominal complexes on the one hand side and Kartvelian and Nakh-Daghestanian language on the other hand side. Only the latter two families make use of postnominal modifiers for emphasis, contrast or focus, although their syntactic status as belonging to the preceding head noun and forming one NP with it is rather doubtful.
The second major parallel is the existence of cleft-like and pseudo-cleft constructions that normally express constituent focus. Although the exact syntactic nature of these constructions has been investigated only for a handful of languages and their status as genuine cleft constructions is rather doubtful, we can generalize that these constructions have a bipartite structure without necessarily being biclausal and make use of subordinate clause structures that are otherwise found in relative clauses. Cleft-like and pseudo-cleft constructions are commonly found in WH-questions, in particular in West Caucasian and a number of Nakh-Daghestanian languages (e.g. Ingush, Avar, Udi). In general, the extent of use of these constructions varies from family to family, but they seem to be most frequent in West Caucasian because they represent the default strategies for the formation of content questions.
The third similarity concerns the frequent use of enclitics and suffixes for information-structuring purposes, but also dedicated focus particles in some languages. In a great number of languages, modal markers, interrogative markers, additives, scalar-additives, discourse markers, and markers with grammatical meaning (person, tense, negation, etc.) are used as focus-sensitive particles and usually placed after the item they scope over or after the head of the phrase.

Several basic-lexicon etymologies, with regular sound correspondences, suggest Hurro-Urartian (HU) might be derived from (or related to) Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Preliminary evidence suggests North-Caucasian (NC) languages might also be related to PIE – in particular, to Iranian languages and Armenian.

Despite of the fact that, in respective literature, the term 'onomatope' occurs less frequently than 'onomatopoeia,' and that the former has been coined by way of back-formation from the latter, it, as a phenomenon, is basic in relation to what is referred to as onomatopoeia. Normally, onomatopes emerge as mimetic entities which are extra-grammatical owing to their non-wordhood (hardly an onomatope can be referred to as ‗word' if it occurs only as a mimetic syllable, that is, if it is not lexicalized). The distinction between just an onomatope and an onomatopoeic word is better visible in morphologically rich languages such as Georgian. It is noteworthy that, with respect to multiple ways of lexicalization and grammaticalization, onomatope-based entities display same semantic processes (for instance, metaphorization) as other lexical items. Thus, onomatopoeic words have usually been very problematic in terms of their translation, and the aforementioned features make them much more problematic. With a view to the above-stated circumstances, the paper deals with a set of Georgian C 1 aC 2 onomatopes; e.g. *bag-, *lac "-, *rak "-, *čak-, etc. (both initial and final consonants may extend to a cluster: *brag-, *tkar-*rac " k "-, *partx-, etc.). The processes of their lexicalization and grammaticalization are diverse:

A work in progress, covering Etruscan Phrases Indo-European Table 1, Parts 1-6. I suppose it would be obvious that the migration of the Indo-Europeans into Europe from what was believed to be the Russian steppes or northern Anatolia and the Caucasus region put them in contact with other groups. Exactly when and where the migration took place and the various groups of people that were affected has been the subject of much controversy. *PIE (Proto-Indo-European) specialists have attempted to explain the interrelationships through speculation on the shifts from one language to another; to the extent that the rules that show shifts that took place in the separation of the proto-Indo-European language(s) tend to be the subject of great debate themselves. This document attempts to circumvent the processes that induce doubtful results by comparing the words of languages that would have been involved in the mix of the early Indo-Europeans and other communities they encountered, as they moved east to west (and in the case of red-haired, Scotch-plaid, kilted Tocharians west to east). One of the languages that stood out in an early stage of our study was the Albanian. Nestled in Eastern Europe between the Croatians and the Serbs, the anomalies seen in their language tend to be a good representative of Indo-European groups mixing with the Slavic, Baltic, Uralic and Kartvelian language groups. Albanian tradition suggests that they are the heirs of the ancient (now extinct) Illyrians, that their language is at least 3,000 years old. Nestled within Yugoslavia, before it collapsed, four of the six constituent republics, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro, shared a common language known as Serbo-Croat. (We use Croatian, together with Belarusian, in this document for comparison of the Slavic with other languages.) The Serbs also claim to have an ancient language. Other languages compared in our table that highlight the mixing of the selected languages include Persian, Avestan, Sanskrit, Hittite, where available Hurrian, and Etruscan. The Etruscan language is important, since it ceased to exist around the 3 rd century B.C. and is believed to have existed in northern Italy (Tuscany) since ~1100 B.C. We thus have in the Etruscan language a language that has been frozen in time, untouched and untampered with, as it were, since it ceased to be spoken, read and understood. We began our Indo-European Table with the purpose of comparing the Etruscan words we isolated in our research (since 1981) with other Indo-European languages. After having established a vocabulary of over 2,500 words, represented in over 600 Etruscan texts, it became apparent in our Indo-European Table that Etruscan is closer to Latin than even the modern " Romance " languages of French and Italian. Having observed over the years of the growing controversy over the relationships of Baltic, Uralic and Kartvelian language families to the Indo-European family, we thought to update our Indo-European Table to include representatives of those languages: Latvian, Finnish and Georgian. The addition of these languages is turning out to be a fascinating exercise, since it tends to explain some of the anomalies we have seen in Albanian. Are the Albanians rooted from ancient Illyria or could they have come into Illyria from the steppes, north of the Black Sea? Ancient Roman maps of the Eastern Roman Empire identify an area north of Armenia in the Caucasus on the Caspian Sea as Albania. Having seen these maps when they first appeared on the internet, courtesy of the University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, we wondered whether the Romans had something

(from a work published in 1981) This table has Indo-European, Hurrian, Georgian (Kartlevian), Latvian (Baltic), Finnish (Uralic), Hittite, Akkadian and Altaic selections. We have colored words that may be related among the various languages/families. The coloring provides an unusual view of the spectrum of the cited languages. A Concordance of the cited languages is available in our Copeland-English-Akkadian Dictionary, our English-Hittite Dictionary Dictionary, an English alphabetized index to the Indo-European Table and our work, "Indo-European-Eurasian Words Linking Ancient Pastoralists." (350 pp.)

Standard Binding Theory does not give a straightforward account for the subject anaphor gap. Rizzi’s (1990) Anaphor Agreement Effect and its modified version (Woolford (1999)) were designed to account for that gap. The paper deals with Georgian anaphors representing counter-examples for both versions of the Anaphor Agreement Effect. It argues that the explanation for the presence of subject anaphors in Georgian can be given neither within Reinhart and Reuland’s (1993) “Reflexivity” framework as it was previously suggested in Anagnostopoulou and Everaert (1999) and Everaert (2001) for Greek and Georgian. In fact there is more than only the internal structure of anaphors and the related anaphoric properties responsible for the existence of subject anaphors.

The paper addresses the etymology, development and use of the Georgian equivalent of Ladies and Gentlemen (kalbat’on.eb.o da bat’on.eb.o [lady.PL.VOC and gentleman.PL.VOC]).
As for its etymology, initially I should target the Latin patron-us which was borrowed by Georgian through Megrelian, its sister language. The Megrelian p’at’on.i (the /r/ was deleted due to the phonotactic incompatibility of the /t’r/ in Megrelian) entered Georgian and, as a result of dissimilative voicing (p’>b), became bat’on.i. Initially, as an equivalent of the Palaeologan δεσπότης, it was used as a title to refer (bat’on.i [lord.NOM]) to and address (bat’on.o [lord.VOC]) kings and princes (the meaning persists in present-day Georgian). Later, it became a generic (gender-inclusive) term used to address superiors and strangers of both genders.
As a result of the influence of European languages (specifically, of mixed-gender binomial terms like Ladies and gentlemen), its feminine counterpart was coined (kalbat’on-o [lady.VOC]).
The 19th century saw the parallel use of the following three versions:
(1) bat’on[.eb].o
gentleman[.PL].VOC
(2) bat’on.eb.o da kalbat’on.eb.o
gentleman.PL.VOC and lady.PL.VOC
(3) kalbat’on.eb.o da bat’on.eb.o
lady.PL.VOC and gentleman.PL.VOC
In the early 20th century, the use of (1) was diminished and (2) and (3) became dominant. The queries in the Georgian National corpus yielded the following results: (2) – 109, (3) – 225. Actually, they are a single mixed-gender address term used as a reversible binomial. The ordering principles hardly pertain to a speaker’s gender preferences; more obviously, (2) is an instance when so called Panini’s Law (a shorter constituent precedes a longer one) is in effect: bat’on.eb.o has four syllables, while kalbat’on.eb.o has five. As for (3), it just follows the most widespread ordering convention in similar mixed-gender binomials of address.
Based on some previous work on address in Georgian (Braun 1988; Kikvidze & Tchantouria 2003), the paper will focus both the binomial term and its individual constituents with special reference to their combinability with pronominal and verb forms of address, and, based on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach (Wierzbicka 2015), it will investigate their meanings and uses in a cross-linguistic perspective.

References
Braun, F. (1988). Terms of Address. Problems of Pattern and Usage in Various Languages and Cultures. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Kikvidze, Z. & Tchantouria, R. (2003). Joint parameterization of honorifics and terms of address in Kartvelian languages. In De Jongh, D., Zeevat, H., Nilsenová, M. (eds.). Proceedings of the 3rd and 4th International Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation. Amsterdam: ILLC Scientific Publications; 53-57.
Wierzbicka, A. (2015). A whole cloud of culture condensed in a drop of semantics: The meaning of the German word Herr as a term of address. International Journal of Language and Culture 2/1: 1-37.

Kartvelian and North Caucasian languages demonstrate many parallels in the basic lexicon. It may be interpreted as an evidence of the affinities between two language families which represent two hypothetical macrofamilies, Nostratic and Sino-Caucasian.

This  paper  deals  with  the  impact  of  complex  morphological  structures  on  essential  aspects  of lexicology. On the basis of data from the Kartvelian (South-Caucasian) language family consisting of Georgian and its sister-languages, it discusses questions of how to lemmatize nominal and verbal word forms so that they can be arranged in a consistent and appropriate way in dictionaries and databases.  The  most  prominent  approaches  that  have  been  developed  since  the  first  attempt  to provide  a  dictionary  of  Georgian  (Paolini  &  Irbachi  1629)  are  analysed  with  a  view  to  their applicability, usability, and conclusiveness.

"Complementation in Georgian is a study of subordinate clauses in Georgian. The constructions in focus are finite and non-finite clauses in subject and object position. Georgian is characterized by complex patterns in marking grammatical relations, using both case marking and subject and object affixes on the verb. The language has no infinitives. In complements of verbs like 'persuade' and 'try' and 'want', Georgian uses finite forms that include subject and object marking, making it an interesting object  for study as regards the problem of control.

Central issues investigated include restrictions in terms of temporal reference and participant reference that the matrix clause imposes on the complement. The modality meanings Truth and Action are found to provide a useful classification of the various matrix predicates. Two clusters of morphological, syntactic and semantic features are moreover shown to correlate with the Truth and Action modalities. The study further outlines a formal grammatical representation of relations between matrix and complement clauses, as well as the structure of simple sentences.

The data examined in the study is based on informant work conducted in Georgia. The matrix predicates that make up the database of the investigation are represented in an appendix, along with an English-Georgian key. An introduction to Georgian grammar for readers not familiar with the language is also presented. ""

Por Georgeos Díaz-Montexano / Scientific Atlantology International Society (SAIS) / The Epigraphic Society

Desde los inicios del presente siglo, varios de nuestros más destacados expertos en epigrafía y lengua íberas coinciden en que la repetición de un término en las torteras o fusayolas ibéricas, que aparece escrito como keśtaun, kaśtaun o kaśtaum, indica que estaríamos ante un término del léxico relacionado con la actividades textiles, incluso que se trate del término usado por los íberos para denominar a la misma tortera. La lingüística histórica comparada nos proporciona una evidencia que permite sustentar dicha hipótesis a través de un vínculo lingüístico entre las dos Iberias.

This dissertation investigates Georgian (Kartvelian) reflexivization strategies within the Government and Binding (Chomsky 1981) and Reflexivity framework (Reinhart and Reuland 1993). It argues that Georgian possesses one simplex and one complex nominal reflexivization strategy, based on a grammaticalized body-part noun. This strategy interacts with a verbal reflexivization strategy.

This dissertation discusses a non-anaphoric use of the phrase formally identical with the complex nominal reflexivization strategy in Object Camouflage (Harris 1981). The contrasting behavior of the phrase as an anaphor and as a pronominal is argued to illustrate the grammaticalization process the body-part has undergone.

The present study observes several problems for the Binding and Reflexivity frameworks, such as the subject use of the Georgian complex nominal reflexivization strategy. If 'Himself is killing him' is ungrammatical in English, its Georgian equivalent is grammatical with the "aspect/property of” reading. This study discusses Madame Tussaud's and similar contexts that allow a proxy reading of Georgian anaphors in subject position. This use is a problem also for various other proposals in the generative literature that aim to explain the absence/presence of subject anaphors cross-linguistically.

This paper deals with the impact of complex morphological structures on essential aspects of lexicology. On the basis of data from the Kartvelian (South-Caucasian) language family consisting of Georgian and its sister-languages, it discusses questions of how to lemmatize nominal and verbal word forms so that they can be arranged in a consistent and appropriate way in dictionaries and databases. The most prominent approaches that have been developed since the first attempt to provide a dictionary of Georgian (Paolini & Irbachi 1629) are analysed with a view to their applicability, usability, and conclusiveness.