XVI. English-Svanetian Vocabulary

Extract

The recent establishment of a fund in the University of Oxford for the encouragement of the study of the Georgian family of languages may in the course of time attract the attention of British philologists to the Western Caucasus, and an increasing stream of travellers will doubtless find their way thither seeking knowledge, health, sport, and scenery; it is for such visitors that the following vocabulary has been compiled. More than twenty years ago the late Mr. D. Peacock included Svanetian among the five languages of which he published vocabularies in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, but the material was scanty, and a large number of errors are to befound in it. Most of the books on the subject are in Russian, and the script into which the Svanetian words are transliterated is troublesome and is inconsistently used. What is required is an exact record of the spoken language by means of the phonograph, and it is to be hoped that some British student may undertake the task before long. All that is attempted here is to give a starting-point for serious study. As many forms as possible have been included, and no attempt has been made to distinguish the dialects of Upper and Lower Svanetia. The spelling is phonetic as far as may be. The abbreviation G. shows that there are Georgian words strikingly similar, and generally, though not always, having the same meaning; many of such words are borrowed by the Georgian from other languages.