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Georgian question | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5449 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes  Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 1 of 2 20 September 2010 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not sure how many have studied Georgian, but I was getting interested in this so I was reading about it. Then I saw this on Wikipedia:
"Georgian has many irregular verbs. It is not possible to give an exact number, because there are different levels of irregularities" As you can see, the "many" is italicized. Is the verb system really THAT irregular? Even more than most Indo-European languages? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5465 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian | Message 2 of 2 21 September 2010 at 1:00am | IP Logged | ||
Yes! The verb system is insane. I don't think, from my admittedly limited experience, that there are all that many verbs which are completely irregular and unpredictable. A few that come to mind are "to be", "to say" and "to give", which are often irregular in other languages. Many other verbs have certain quirks such as adding a "v" here and there, but these become quite predictable with experience. The problem is that there are so many conjugation patterns and no way of telling which verb belongs to which pattern. Most textbooks say there are four main conjugation types, but a textbook I recently bought from Georgia divides verbs into 14 types, which seems closer to the truth to me. This basically means that you have to learn at least the future, aorist (past) and present perfect of each new verb. You also have to know whether the verb is type 1, 2, 3 or 4 because the cases of the subject and object change depending on the type. For example, in type 1 verbs, the subject is in the nominative and the direct object in the dative in the present and future tenses, but in the aorist the subject takes the ergative case and the direct object the nominative. In type four verbs, the subject takes the dative and the direct object the nominative, and so on and so forth. You can also add direct objects and indirect objects to the verb so that you only need a single word "gamomigzavna" to express the English sentence "She sent it to me". These patterns are regular though so they aren't so difficult. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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