Re: vprtskvni (was Re: average syllables per word?)

Dan Sulani <dnsulani@...> wrote:
>
>         Last night, I asked my neighbor, who is from Georgia, how one
> would say
> "I am peeling it". The response I got was /me  vprtskni/.  (/me/ = I ).
> I made it very clear that the form I wanted was "I am peeling  _it_",
> I still got /me vprtskni/.
/snip/
>         As to the form,  my neighbor didn't understand any word such as
> "vprtskvni".  According to your grammars what exactly is the person,
> tense, etc. of this
> form?
> Perhaps the /v/ in /kvni/ is an infix signifying "it". If so, could this
> form be
> literary Georgian, as opposed to the "street Georgian"  that my neighbor
> speaks?
Probably. There are several dialects also (my source mentions 17), and
the standard literary form (which I assume is the one the grammar describes)
is based on one particular dialect.

The grammar only cited _vprtskvni_ as an example of extreme consonant
clustering, giving the gloss, but no morpheme breakdown.

>
>       ( BTW, could you provide me with the name of your grammar? I've
> been wanting
> to teach myself Georgian for years, and although I've searched all over,
> I haven't
> found any grammars for the language!)
I'm sorry to tell you but it's really a quick grammar survey (well, not
that quick, but not a full grammar). I downloaded it (four webpages, 109KB)
a long time ago and I don't have the URL. But it wasn't that hard to find.
Try searching for "online grammar Georgian" or maybe the Human Languages
Page (http://www.hlp.com/ ??); that's how I found it in the first place,
I think. It's quite interesting for a start, so you can see what you're
dealing with. :)


--Pablo Flores