Tag Archives: alphabets

Georgian – kartuli ena

Mkhedruli.svg

Today´s post is about the Georgian language, which is called ქართული ენა kartuli ena in Georgian and belongs to the Kartvelian group of languages and is spoken by about 4.3 million people. In my opinion, the Georgian alphabet is one of the most beautiful scripts in the world. The alphabet has no capital letters and consists of 33 letters, of which 5 are vowels and 28 are consonants. The script is written from left to right. The Georgian language is an agglutinative language, which means that verbs and words are formed by adding prefixes and suffixes to a root. For example, the root kartv refers to ‘Georgia’, so Sakartvelo means ‘Georgia’, kartuli the ‘Georgian language’ and kartveli a ‘Georgian person’.

Here some basic phrases to give you an impression of this not so well-known language:

გამარჯობათ [gamarjobat]   Hello!

გმადლობთ [gmadlobt]  Thank you!

ნახვამდის [nakhvamdis]  Goodbye!

მაპატიეთ [mapatiet]  I’m sorry!

გეთაყვა [getaqva] please

ჩემი სახელია … [chemi sakhelia….]  My name is…

800px-Svaneti,_georgia

Useful multilingual on-screen keyboard to type non-Latin alphabets

A website I find very useful for typing non-Latin scripts and languages is the Lexilogos online keyboard: http://www.lexilogos.com/keyboard/index.htm

It is very comprehensive and features keyboards for dozens of scripts. You just type your text on-screen into a window using the keyboard provided and then you can copy and paste your text into your document or text. It is especially useful if your computer skills aren´t that brilliant (like mine) and you don´t know how to type a certain language otherwise or if you cannot change your keyboard for some reason or other.