Georgian alphabet

The Georgian alphabet (in Georgian, ქართული დამწერლობა kartuli damts'erloba) consists of 33 letters used to write Georgian and other nearby languages. It is characterized because in its historical evolution it has taken three very divergent, but equivalent forms: asomtavruli (ecclesiastical capital letters), nusjuri (ecclesiastical lower case) and mjedruli (modern secular). It is a unicameral alphabet and is written from left to right.

The oldest samples of the alphabet are the Bir el-Qutt inscriptions dated to AD 430. C. and found in a Georgian monastery in Palestine, using the asomtavruli system. This would gradually be replaced by the nusjuri (nuskhuri), around the 9th century. The nusjuri was in turn replaced by the more rounded version, known as the mjedruli (mkhedruli), which would become common in the 10th century. Georgian Orthodox continues to make extensive use of the above two systems in its writings and iconography.

Modern letters, like ancient ones, are a unicameral script: they are not case-sensitive. However, when the nusjuri letters were developed, they were combined with asomtavruli in a similar way to lowercase and uppercase, thus temporarily forming a bicameral script that we call "khutsuri". Some authors still use the classical round letters asomtavruli as capital letters in modern texts for headlines, for logos, etc. A capital variant (called "mtavruli") of the modern alphabet has also been developed, easier to read than the old classical forms.

In 2016 UNESCO inscribed this writing on the representative list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity under the title "living cultural tradition of the three writing systems of the Georgian alphabet".

The three forms of alphabet: asomtavruli, nusjuri and mjedruli.

Asomtavruli

One of Bir el Qutt's inscriptions, 430 AD.

The mrgvlovani (Georgian: მრგვლოვანი), a term derived from mrgvali (მრგვალი), meaning rounded, is the traditional name for the more ancient Georgian alphabet, today the term asomtavruli (Georgian: ასომთავრული; /ɑsɔmtʰɑvruli/) is used, which means “capital letters”, a word that is composed of the term aso (ასო) "letter" and mtavari (მთავარი) "main", this is because it has been used in combination with the others, to decorate capital letters, in the illuminated manuscript style, but it is really a unicameral script.

The earliest texts in asomtavruli (and therefore Georgian) date from the V century and are the ones found in the Bir el Qutt and Bolnisi inscriptions.

From the IX century, nusjuri became predominant and the use of asomtavruli declined. However, the epigraphs on monuments, from the X century to the XVIII, asomtavruli continued to be written. In the later period the asomtavruli became more decorative. In most IX century Georgian manuscripts that were written in Nuskhuri, asomtavruli was used for titles and capital letters However, some manuscripts could still be found up to XI written entirely in Asomtavruli. combination of nuskhuri and asomtavruli, asomtavruli spellings were distinguished by being larger or in cinnabar ink, but over time, from the X its shape was elaborately decorated. The decorative style in the asomtavruli can be used to identify the era of a text; for example, in Byzantine-era manuscripts when Byzantine art influenced Georgian art, capital letters were decorated with drawings of birds or other animals.

From the XI the strokes were decorated with flowers, arrows and geometric designs combining lines and dots. The first two are found in monuments from the 11th and 12th centuries, while the points or geometric shapes are found in those from the 18th century onwards. The importance of a word was also related to the color of the ink. The letter დ (doni) of the asomtavruli alphabet is often decorated with fish and birds.

There is a twisted decorative form of asomtavruli that consists of mixing letters together, attached with hooks, or drawing small letters inside larger letters. This style was used mainly for manuscript titles, although it can also be found in some inscriptions.

Nuskhuri

Mikael Modrekili nusjuri calligraphy, centuryX

Nusjuri (Georgian: ნუსხური; /nusxuri/, adapted to Spanish as nusjuri) is the second type of alphabet, by antiquity, used by the Georgian language. The word nuskhuri comes from nuskha (ნუსხა), which means "listed". Nusjuri was soon combined with capital letters in asomtavruli, in the manner already described in the previous section. This combination is called khutsuri (Georgian: ხუცური, literally meaning "clerical", a term derived from khutsesi (ხუცესი "cleric") and it is used in hagiographies.

Nusjuri first appeared in the IX century as a graphic variant of asomtavruli. 835 and is in the Church of Ateni Sioni. The oldest manuscripts found in Nusjuri date from the year 864. This alphabet took precedence over Asomtavruli from the X.

Appearance

Nusjuri characters vary in height, some are upstroke and some are downstroke, and slant to the right. The letters have an angular shape, with a notorious tendency to simplify the forms used in the asomtavruli. This allowed for faster typing.

Mjedruli

Letter from Queen Tamar of Georgia, centuryXII

Mkhedruli, adapted to Spanish as "mjedruli", literally "caballero", is a term that derives from mkhedari (მხედარი) which can be translated as rider, knight, warrior. Mkhedruli, which was originally unicameral, currently has a capital form imitating the Latin alphabet called Mkhedruli Mtavruli (მხედრული მთავრული) or simply mtavruli (მთავრული; pronounced /mtʰɑvruli/), however it is not mandatory and is rarely used. At present, mtavruli usually uses texts written entirely in capital letters such as labels, titles, or to emphasize a word, although at the end of the XIX and beginning of the XX was occasionally used, as it is done in the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet, for the first letter of proper names and at the beginning of sentences.

Mkhedruli first appeared in the X century. The oldest mkhedruli inscription was found in the church of Ateni Sioni, dated before 982 AD. C. The second text by antiquity is from the XI and is a document from the court of King Bagrat Georgia IV. Since then mkhedruli became the most widely used type of alphabet in the Kingdom of Georgia for official documents, historical documents, manuscripts and inscriptions. Thus it became the alphabet for civil, royal and secular affairs, although never used. for religious purposes. When printed texts began to be used in the 19th century, the mkhedruli was established as the official typeface for religious texts. in Georgian.

Obsolete letters

The Society for the Diffusion of Literacy among Georgians, founded by Prince Ilià Txavtxavadze in 1879, eliminated five letters that had become redundant:

• (he) Also called "is"or "e-merve." ("octava e"), was equivalent to a Hey, as in Manifesto krist'ey (Christ)
• (hie) Also called iota, used in substitution of wich (ini) after vowel, but he ended up having the same pronunciation as (ini) and was replaced by this letter. Therefore expressing inclusiveness (~ ה ((krist'ey, «Christ») is now written ↓ (krist'e).
• (vie) ended up pronounced just like ი meant vi and replaced, for example, in,の,の,。skhvisi“Other”).
• (qari, hari) ended up pronounced just like que (khan), and replaced by this lyrics, for example).の).の).). become).の).。 (“Soberan”).
• (hoe) employed in the intersection Hoi! that is now written. meant.

Ligatures, abbreviations and calligraphy

Asomtavruli often takes highly stylized forms and ligatures customized by the scribe, as well as interlocking letters and letters nested within each other to form monograms.

• 

  Monogram of King Vakhtang I of Iberia,)) (), GN)

• 

  de de, da (ა,, da) ligation for the "y" conjunction

The nuskhuri can also appear stylized. Writers form ligatures and abbreviations for nomina sacra, which include upside-down Z-shaped diacritics called karagma, reminiscent of the title of the Cyrillic alphabet.. Since writing supports such as vellum were scarce and expensive, abbreviation was the norm in writing manuscripts and hagiographies around the 11th century

Mkhedruli between the 11th and 17th centuries used digraphs to the point of making them obligatory according to a complex system.

• 

  Abbreviation in nuskhuri: ▷✅ (Romeli, "who"

• 

  Abbreviation in nuskhuri: מქ국 のの en (Iesu kriste, «Jesus Christ»

• 

  Length in mkhedruli:: (da, “y”

Mkhedruli calligraphy of Prince Garsevan Chavchavadze and King Archil of Imeretia:

Punctuation

In asomtavruli and nuskhuri various punctuation combinations are used to separate words, phrases, clarifications and paragraphs. In monument and manuscript inscriptions from the V century to the X, the separations were done with hyphens, such as -, = and =-. In the century X appear as groups of one period (·), two (:), three (჻) and six (჻჻), later replaced by small circles, an idea created by Ephrem Mtsire to indicate pauses in reading of less or more duration. A dot indicated a minor stop (especially between words), two dots separated or marked special words, three dots indicated a major stop (such as a noun in apposition and in titles accompanying personal names, for example "the sovereign Alexandre ", as can be seen in the image below, or in titles, as you have already seen in the image above from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew) and six points indicated the end of a sentence.

At the beginning of the XI century, the apostrophe and comma began to be used. An apostrophe marked a word as a question mark, and a comma appeared at the end of a question phrase. Since XII they have been replaced by a semicolon, which is the Greek alphabet used for question marks). In the XVIII patriarch Antony I of Georgia reformed the punctuation system by entering: commas, single point, double point, used for mark if the sentence was "finished", "unfinished" or if it was the "end" of a paragraph or text. Modern Georgian is written primarily using the international punctuation derived from the Latin script.

Use in non-Kartvelian languages

Text osetio written in mkhedruli, belonging to a book on the folklore of Osetia published in the south of that country in 1940. You can see two graphs that do not belong to the Georgian alphabet:. [f] and. [ ISSN].

• In Ossetio until the 1940s.
• Abkhaz until the 1940s.
• In ingusetio (historically), replaced in XVII by the Arabic alphabet and by Cyrillic in modern times.
• In Chechen (historically), replaced in XVII by Arabic and Cyrillic in modern times.
• In avar (historically), replaced in XVII for Arabic and Cyrillic in modern times.
• In Turkish and Azeri. There is a Gospel Turkish, a dictionary, poems and a medicine book dating from the century XVIII
• Persian. The translation of Arabic into Persian Gospels made in the centuryXVIII which is preserved in the National Center of Manuscripts of Tiflis.
• In Armenian. In the Armenian community of Tiflis, the Georgian alphabet was sometimes used to write in Armenian during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• In Russian. In the collections of the National Centre of Manuscripts of Tiflis there are some short poems written in Russian used by the Georgian Alfabia dating back to the end of the centuryXVIII and early 19th.
• In other Northeast Caucasian languages. It was used to write texts in daguestaní related to Georgian religious missions early in the 18th century.

Digital encoding

The first Georgian typeface was included in the Unicode standard in October 1991 with version 1.0. In creating the Georgian unicode block, they had significant input from German Jost Gippert, a linguist specializing in Georgian studies, Michael Everson, an Irish linguist and programmer, who developed the Georgian font for the Macintosh. Also significant contributions were made by Anton Dumbadze and Irakli Garibashvili. (not to be confused with the eponymous Prime Minister of Georgia).

Mkhedruli received official status to become an internationalized domain name (.გე).

The pseudo-capital forms of mtavruli were added to Unicode version 11.0 in June 2018. They act as capital letters, albeit with a descending stem below the base line, with a broad central oval, and a slightly larger top. taller than the rising shaft. Prior to this addition, font creators included mtavruli in various forms. Some fonts were paired, one for uppercase and another version for lowercase; some unicode sources placed mtavruli in the range reserved for asomtavruli (U+10A0-U+10CF) or in the area of private use or replacing ASCII capitalization.