Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

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Fear_a_Phléasc
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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby Fear_a_Phléasc » 2013-12-14, 20:44

Sorry, I meant conjunctive. Substitute "conjunctive" for "conditional" and the question becomes a valid one.

I edited my original post to be slightly more clear. What I'm asking is either 1) why is the conjunctive in this case using the present version of the verb instead of the future? or 2) is the conjunctive always formed this way, because as far as I can tell he isn't explicit on this matter. At least he doesn't go into how to form the conjunctive from verbs which differ in the future vs. present tenses, of which he has so far presented only a few (xedav vs. naxav is the other that springs to mind). Yet another question would be 3) is ვიკითხავდეთ even a real word?

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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby HoneyBuzzard » 2013-12-14, 23:11

Hmm, then I don't see the problem. If you ask somebody if they smoke, and they reply in the affirmative, they don't say "yes, I will smoke," but "yes, I smoke" even if they're not presently smoking. It's a general statement.

The future conjunctive would presumably be talking about a specific counterfactual future situation, e.g., §4.1.2 has two examples with future conjunctives, the ones about the road and the article, but it talks about the building of a specific road, and the writing of a specific article. The present conjunctive would probably have been used if the examples had been "if they would build roads" and "if he would write articles."

The future conjunctive generally isn't common. This probably ties into the common crosslinguistic pattern of the future tense and the subjunctive mood being connected, e.g., in Ancient Greek there is no future subjunctive (the common future indicative originated in the aorist subjunctive), and in Old Georgian the original conjunctive (the modern optative) doubled as the future screeve.

The conjunctives of class I verbs are always formed this way regardless of how the future-group and present-group stems are formed, i.e., present conjunctive ვხედავდე vs. future conjunctive ვნახავდე.

I can't find any examples of ვიკითხავდეთ, and it's not too surprising. Like I said, future conjunctives aren't common, and even ვნახავდე only gives three hits on Google vs. almost three-hundred for ვხედავდე, and the imperfect has over twice as many.

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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby Fear_a_Phléasc » 2013-12-15, 8:36

Hmm, then I don't see the problem. If you ask somebody if they smoke, and they reply in the affirmative, they don't say "yes, I will smoke," but "yes, I smoke" even if they're not presently smoking. It's a general statement.


I don't see the relevance of this to the question, to be honest. Maybe I'm missing something.

The conjunctives of class I verbs are always formed this way regardless of how the future-group and present-group stems are formed, i.e., present conjunctive ვხედავდე vs. future conjunctive ვნახავდე.


I'm not understanding this statement either. It seems that what follows the "i.e." contradicts what comes before it. Again, maybe I'm missing something.

I can't find any examples of ვიკითხავდეთ, and it's not too surprising. Like I said, future conjunctives aren't common, and even ვნახავდე only gives three hits on Google vs. almost three-hundred for ვხედავდე, and the imperfect has over twice as many.


I'm really wary of trusting Google search results to indicate correctness of something. As a speaker of Irish Gaelic, I can say that in many cases, the incorrect versions outnumber the correct versions in the Google search results. It's not entirely unuseful but I prefer to actually get the word of a native.

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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby HoneyBuzzard » 2013-12-15, 19:00

Fear_a_Phléasc wrote:I don't see the relevance of this to the question, to be honest. Maybe I'm missing something.


My point was simply that the future tense and subjunctive mood both describe ideas, and like in English the present screeve can be used to make general statements, so the present conjunctive isn't out of place here.

Fear_a_Phléasc wrote:I'm not understanding this statement either. It seems that what follows the "i.e." contradicts what comes before it. Again, maybe I'm missing something.


What do you think is missing? The conjunctive stems of class I verbs are formed from the corresponding future and present stems with a -დ formant regardless of whether the future and present stems are formed using preverbs or suppletion.

Fear_a_Phléasc wrote:I'm really wary of trusting Google search results to indicate correctness of something. As a speaker of Irish Gaelic, I can say that in many cases, the incorrect versions outnumber the correct versions in the Google search results. It's not entirely unuseful but I prefer to actually get the word of a native.


By all means! If you can get a native speaker to weigh in on the issue, I'd love to hear it.

You don't have to take Google's word for it either, go ahead and count how many future conjunctives you can find in the remainder of the book. I did.

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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby Fear_a_Phléasc » 2013-12-15, 19:18

You don't have to take Google's word for it either, go ahead and count how many future conjunctives you can find in the remainder of the book. I did.


Oh, to be clear, I don't think you're wrong, and I have a feeling that in this instance Google is probably representative of the truth. I haven't read any further in Aronson's book yet and I'm sure once I do I'll start to understand this more, as I encounter more examples. For the most part I find his grammar explanations to be good, but this is one thing I don't feel was adequately explained. He seems to think it enough, in his explanation of the difference in perfective and imperfective, to compare it to a Russian verb - something that means absolutely nothing to me as I don't speak Russian. He does this in several places and it's somewhat puzzling that he is unable to find a more satisfactory explanation using only English.

Thanks for your help, at any rate. It sounds like as long as I just stick with the present forms, I'll be fine.

Also, wasn't this thread started by a native? Shame they aren't here to weigh in on this.

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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby HoneyBuzzard » 2013-12-15, 20:22

Yes, but she hasn't logged in in three years. I don't know what happened to her. We've had several native speakers come to the forum since, but they all disappear after a few posts.

I guess I can't blame them, I never go to the Danish forum. :?

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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby E}{pugnator » 2013-12-18, 21:02

Have you tried other sources? As a speaker of Portuguese, I keep understanding and misunderstanding subjunctive in other languages. I'm sure there are other sources that at least provide some more examples, though.
Learning Georgian, Mandarin Chinese, Russian and Papiamentu from scratch. Trying to brush up my Norwegian up to an advanced level.

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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby Fear_a_Phléasc » 2014-01-26, 1:35

So I recently got my nice new copy of Essentials of Georgian Grammar. It's a great book, however it's in badly need of an answer key. I started at the beginning, even though it's going to be mostly review at first aside from specific vocabulary. None of exercise 1 gave me any issues except the following sentence:

დათვი ათია

Simple enough, but what is this actually supposed to mean? The bear is ten (as in years old)? Or am I missing something?

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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby HoneyBuzzard » 2014-01-26, 13:48

Fear_a_Phléasc wrote:დათვი ათია


I'm glad to hear you got your book. International shipping is always a bother. :)

Age is expressed with the genitive of წელი, e.g., როცა თექვსმეტი წლის იყო when he was 16 years old. That's for humans, but I assume it's the same for animals. Nouns with numeral qualifiers occur in the singular, so my guess would be "there are ten bears."

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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby Fear_a_Phléasc » 2014-01-27, 4:41

Age is expressed with the genitive of წელი, e.g., როცა თექვსმეტი წლის იყო when he was 16 years old.


Yeah, that's what I thought. I hadn't come across anyone just using the number that way, but wasn't sure, given how obvious this example apparently is supposed to be (I'm now on Lesson 5 and haven't encountered anything else yet that is this perplexing). The "ten bears" also occurred to me and I think it's the right answer. It's kind of interesting how scant the book is on grammatical explanation, at least so far. Thanks for your response ;)

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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby Kavkaz » 2016-04-17, 18:50

No one's posted in here in this thread ~2 years, so I'm not sure if anyone will see this. But let's see if I get an answer :whistle:

I'm going through the აღმართი A1 book right now, and they just introduced (what I assume) is the genitive. I say "assume" because it's a monolingual book. I was under the impression that nouns ending in -ა and -ე had the genitive endings -ის, yet that's not what I'm seeing in this book. Here is a screenshot of the section in question:

Image

If you can't see the photo for whatever reason, they give the examples ლუკას ფოტო and მათეს ფოტო. Why aren't they ლუკის ფოტო and მათის ფოტო? It looks like ლუკას and მათეს are in the dative case to me, which doesn't seem to make sense since the heading of this graphic is ვისი.

მადლობა in advance.
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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby HoneyBuzzard » 2016-04-18, 17:55

Yeah, it's pretty quiet here these days. Hopefully it'll pick up some time. I've thought about posting my study notes, but most of them are just me complaining about words I can't find in my dictionary, heh.

ლუკა and მათე are names, not regular nouns. There are a few special rules for both first names and surnames, and one is that final ეs and აs don't elide.

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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby Kavkaz » 2016-04-18, 18:12

Ah, I think I saw that later on in the chapter (though like I said, it's monolingual and since I have no teacher, I can't be sure if I've misunderstood). The examples they gave were:

"მისი: ნინოს / გიორგის / ბათუს / ანას / თორნიკეს კომპიუტერი.
ის / ძმის / დედის / მამის / ბებიის კომპიუტერი."


მადლობა for the help.
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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby Kavkaz » 2016-04-21, 1:06

Does anyone--or maybe I should say does HoneyBadger--know when to use -ზე and when to use შესახებ when you are saying "about"? Which is correct, or sounds more natural?

Examples:
მე ვკითხულობ წიგნს ქართულ ენაზე.
მე ვკითხულობ წიგნს ქართული ენის შესახებ.
I am reading a book about the Georgian language.

These may be bad sentences. Maybe they should read "ქართული ენის წიგნს" instead. Regardless, if someone could answer regarding the -ზე/შესახებ distinction, I'd appreciate it.
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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby HoneyBuzzard » 2016-04-22, 12:22

I'm afraid I don't know. -ზე seems to be more common, at least in the texts I read.

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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby Kavkaz » 2016-04-22, 18:59

No problem, thanks for the response.

And sorry about calling you HoneyBadger instead of HoneyBuzzard. Lol. Shouldn't have relied on my memory.
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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby Kavkaz » 2016-04-28, 19:14

In Aronson's Georgian: A Reading Grammar they give the sentence "მხოლოდ წითელია ჩემი" and translate it as: "Only the red one is mine." Wouldn't that be "მხოლოდ წითელი ჩემია" though? The sentence they gave looks like "Only mine is the red one." Perhaps I don't grasp how the enclitic -ა is used.
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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby HoneyBuzzard » 2016-04-29, 23:07

The position of the copula, whether it is არის or ა, doesn't really matter, it's more an issue of the "only," as adverbs only have scope over the verb. For the sense of "only" in the scope of a noun -ღა is suffixed to the noun instead. "Only mine is red" would be ჩემიღა წითელია.

I can't find a lot of examples of ჩემიღა, in my experience -ღა mostly shows up on regular nouns, but I did find ორი ხმა უკვე გაქთ და ჩემიღა გაკლიათ "you already have two votes, and you lack only mine," which shows a real-world example. There are a lot more examples of -ღა later in Reading Grammar.

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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby HoneyBuzzard » 2016-04-30, 9:40

Actually now that I've thought about it some more, I think it does come down to word order as well. Word order tends to be free, but in a copular sentence the subject comes first, so even though -ღა has scope over the word it's attached to, მხოლოდ ჩემია წითელი would probably do as well for "only mine is red."

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Re: Your Questions about Georgian Grammar

Postby Kavkaz » 2016-05-02, 8:25

Good answers, thanks. I'll have a headstart on that postposition when I come to it now.

Here's another question, revolving around sentences 28 and 29 in the exercises section of Chapter 5 in Aronson. It deals with the aorist of თარგმნა.

„ვეფხისტყაოსანი” რუსულ ენაზე პირველად გასულ საუკუნეში გადაითარგმნა. მთარგმნელი იყო სახელოვანი რუსი პოეტი ბალმონტი.

ის წიგნები ბერძნულიდან ითარგმნა, ესენი კი, ძველი სომხურიდან. ის გუშინ წავიკითხე, ამას კი, ახლა ვკითხულობ.

Why did he use the prefixed form of the verb in the first sentence and the unprefixed one in the second? They both seem to translate as "were translated" in English, and I don't see much of an aspectual (i.e. perfective/imperfective) distinction. I'm guessing that's what he's getting at, though, and that's why he included პირველად in the first sentence, to stress the perfective nature of the verb. Here's his own footnote after writing that the perfective aorist is far more common than the imperfective aorist:

"Much less common is the imperfective aorist, formed from the present stem (i.e., generally without preverb). It can indicate that the action ended without achieving the desired result: კარი ვაღე ‘I tried to open the door (unsuccessfully)’ as opposed to კარი გავაღე ‘I opened the door (perfective aorist). Note that the use of the imperfect, კარს ვაღებდი ‘I was opening the door’ generally implies that the door will be opened. The imperfective aorist (often repeated) can also indicate a series of such unsuccessful attempt"

In the second example sentence, it doesn't seem like any of those conditions apply. The books were successfully translated...so does that mean there's an implication there were a series of unsuccessful translation attempts? I definitely didn't get that feeling from the rest of the sentence.
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