Basic Principles of Georgian (Grammar and Spelling)

I have already written about Georgian language and Georgian script. Recently some of our customers asked for a basic guide for the Georgian grammar, and I decided to create blog post series Basic Principles of Georgian dedicated for this topic. Since this topic covers many sections I will start with Grammar and Spelling.What makes Georgian special? Georgian does not distinguish between male and female in ANY area of its grammar. There is no difference between the UPPER and lower case of the Georgian alphabet.Grammar and SpellingNOUNS

1.  Georgian nouns do not distinguish gender or class (with the exception of an occasional weak distinction between animate and inanimate). The pronouns that reference these nouns can, therefore, refer to either males or females (or, indeed, to non-animate entities). To indicate that the subject of a sentence is male or female, the words “this man” or “this woman” have to be added. 
2. There are 7 cases for the nouns, with which adjectives agree. 
3. The eb-plural is the usual; the n-plural is used in some fixed phrases and for a limited number of stylistic purposes. The plural forms are suffixes, inserted as the penultimate syllable.

Inanimate plural nouns have the verb in the singular. ADJECTIVES Adjectives usually precede the nouns which they qualify. Their stems have the same endings as those of nouns, but they do not have to agree in terms of gender. VERBS 

1.  The average number of morphemes (that is, basic grammatical units) per word is higher than in most European languages due to the process of agglutination (that is, word formation through combining sequences of elements, each with a distinctive role)
2.  Verbs fall into a number of contrasting classes, based on their grammatical behaviour and roles 
3. The familiar tenses (past, present, future, etc.) are replaced by what are known as ‘screeves’, which are characterized by more than just differences in the time reference 
4. The verb can include references to the subject and the direct and indirect objects, (polypersonalism) as, for example, in the translation of ‘I sent it to him’, which is a single word in Georgian 5) Indirect objects can be marked as benefactors, possessors, and the like; this is known as 'version' 
5. Subjects and objects are indicated in a more complex way through case marking 
6. There is a more precise distinction of direction with verbs of motion than in many of the more familiar languages, using verb prefixes known as directional preverbs. 

Gender: Georgian does not distinguish between male and female in ANY area of its grammar. Articles: There are no articles ('a', 'the') in Georgian, so a Georgian noun may be translated as, for example, ‘friend’, ‘a friend’, or ‘the friend’, as the context requires. One letter words: There are none in Georgian. Accents: There are no accents in Georgian. Capitalisation: There is no difference between the upper and lower case of the Georgian alphabet. Suffixes: Georgian uses postpositions in place of the English prepositions ('on', 'for', etc.). These may be in the form of either a postfix attached to the noun, or a separate word which follows it. The case of the nouns is determined by the choice of postposition.

• Used resources: Georgian