South Caucasian Language

The paper is a discussion of the Megrelian data contained in George Ellis’s book Memoir of a Map of the Countries Comprehended Between the Black Sea and the Caspian; with an Account of the Caucasian Nations, and Vocabularies of Their Languages (1788). The final part of the book presents specimens of the Caucasian languages, including those belonging to the Kartvelian branch. There are 128 entries. The resource is organized in the following way: the leftmost column displays headwords in English, followed by translations into
Georgian, Megrelian, and Svan. The latter two (Megrelian and Svan) segments are deficient: not all of them contain translations into all the three languages. There are 62 entries with Megrelian equivalents. Detected spelling and/or transliteration errors and translation inadequacies
may seem abundant for a sample consisting of only 62 entries; however, G. Ellis’s lexicographic resource should be valued for adequate representations of Megrelian linguistic data and for being the earliest work in the history of English-Megrelian lexicography.

The present monograph was written within the framework of the project Phonosemantic
Vocabulary in Kartvelian Languages (Structure, Semantics, Pragmatics) (No 31/20) funded by
Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation in 2013-2016; the project was implemented at the
Institute of Linguistic Research (specifically, Research Group of Kartvelian Languages), Ilia State
University.
Success of the project proposal was due to a number of factors:
1. Phonetic symbolism and onomatopoeia, as rather significant linguistic phenomena in
Kartvelian languages, was not systematically described and analyzed by scholars; moreover, it was
not studied at all in Svan and Laz; however, these phenomena always attracted scholarly interest,
and this is well attested with occasionally published papers.
2. Notwithstanding the fact that phonosymbolic and onomatopoeic items are parts of actual
language, most of them were not considered “full-fledged members” of the lexicon. Their inclusion
in dictionaries were a disputable issue. Recently published dictionaries (Svan – A. Liparteliani’s
dictionary, Megrelian – O. Kajaia’s and A. Kobalia’s dictionaries, Laz – A. Tandilava’s dictionary,
Georgian Dialect Corpus and dialect dictionaries: http://www.corpora.co), providing a more
comprehensive description of the items in point, stated the necessity of the scholarly study of the
phenomenon in question, on the one hand, and facilitated its complete research.
The present book Phonosemantic Vocabulary in Kartvelian Languages provides analyses of a
number of significant linguistic problems associated with phonosemantics (as a linguistic process)
and phonosemantic vocabulary (as outcome of the process).

The paper is a discussion of the Megrelian data in D. R. Peacock's work " Original Vocabularies of Five West Caucasian Languages " (1877). It contains 143 Megrelian lexemes both in singular and plural, up to 50 phrases and about 22 sentences. A headword is an English item being translated into the five languages, Megrelian among them, and transliterated in accordance with the rules of English orthography. We analysed the data with respect to how they are transliterated and translated, having observed a number of transliteration, lexical and grammatical errors. Notwithstanding those shortcomings, Peacock's vocabulary should be valued both for its being one of the earliest works in the scarce history of English-Megrelian lexicography and for adequate representations of Megrelian linguistic data.

8th International Research Conference on Education, Language and Literature. Proceedings Book. Tbilisi: IBSU, 2018; pp. 490-496.

The paper is a discussion of the Laz lexical data contained in
D.R. Peacock‘s lexicographic collection ―Original Vocabularies of Five
West Caucasian Languages‖, in which English headwords are accompanied by their translations in Georgian, Megrelian, Laz, Svan, and Abkhazian. Laz is the most under-resourced Kartvelian (South Caucasian) language; therefore, Laz data, available in various, particularly, so far thoroughly unexamined sources, can serve as a valuable contribution to its representativeness. Hence, in order to fill in the gap, we provide a description of the lexical part of the collection in question and reflections of some following students of the Laz language.
Keywords: Laz, lexis, Kartvelian languages, D.R. Peacock