Georgian [was Re: cyrillic?]

Quoting Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...>:

> Tomasi Virma dats'era:
Some nitpicks:

(1) Probably, if one were transliterating a western name "Thomas"
into Georgian, one would use the Georgian equivalent thereof: _Tamaz_
-- which incidentally is not from Greek, but from the Semitic name
of the Mesopotamian deity.  cf. Tamaz Gamq'relije > Thomas Gamqrelidze

(2) First names do not take case endings: _Tamaz Uierma dac'era_
"Thomas Wier wrote it". Georgians perceive English /w/ as
Georgian /u/;  I use the spelling translation "Uieri" because
the Georgian word _uiri_ means "donkey".

> > Georgian must be a terror for dyslexics:
> > no less than eight of the thirty-three letters look like the
> > number three!
>
> IMHO, only vin (ვ), k'an (კ) and p'ar (პ) may be confused on early
> stages...
This is debatable of course :) When I was first learning the
language, gani, vini, k'ani, p'ari, hae and a number of uncommon/
archaic letters looked like "3".

> > More seriously, Georgian has all sorts of
> > alternative scripts and fonts, all commonly used unlike those
> > in English, that make reading more difficult as one is first
> > learning it.
>
> I didn't know that. All the fonts on my computer (in 4 encodings: ITV, Mail
> Standard, Parliament Standard and Unicode) and in two primers are quite
> readable, all being variants of Mkhedruli script.
>
> Trist'an Maklimats dats'era:
"T'rist'an Maklimts dac'era" :)

(This assumes that the Georgians would interpret the name
"McLeay" as a stem ending in a vowel; if they interpret the
/i/ as the nominative case suffix, then it would be the easily
pronounceable "Maklmats". I'm entirely sure how they would handle
the "Mc", though. I suspect they do whatever Russian does.)

> > it still looks good!
>
> Agreed 100%. And the language is great too.
> If one needs a real horror, that's lowercase Armenian!
Yes, I must say that's much more horrific.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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