Alexander Chulukhadze
PhD in Literature and Human Sciences
The University of Georgia
Associate Professor
Head of the Department of Oriental Studies
Senior Researcher of the Tamaz Beradze Institute of Georgian Studies
Tbilisi, Georgia
a.chulukhadze@ug.edu.ge
The Foreign Vocabulary of “The Martyrdom of Saint Queen Shushanik”
by Iakob Khutsesi
“The Martyrdom of Queen Shushanik” by Iakob Tsurtaveli is the oldest surviving monument of Georgian literature, which has a special place in the history of Georgian literature. The text uses a variety of foreign vocabulary, the analysis of which allows us to create a broader and clearer understanding of many issues and features of the historical, political, social, economic, cultural, religious, military-administrative and other relations of Georgia with different cultures of the early Middle Ages.
A linguistic study of the full and short Georgian versions and svinaksar editions of “The Martyrdom of Queen Shushanik” revealed 148 borrowings that influenced into the Georgian language in different times, in different ways and from different languages. 73 Iranian (three Old Persian, seven Parthian, 40 Middle Persian, one New Persian and one Alan-Ossetian), 17 Armenian, 25 Greek, 13 Hebrew, 6 Latin, 4 Arabic, 1 Aramaic, 1 Syriac and 2 Turkic loanwords and phonetic variants of several lexemes were studied.
The research material is very diverse in terms of semantics and purpose and includes religious, social, military, administrative and other vocabularies, 45 proper, 19 geographical and ethnic names, some of which, undoubtedly, were influenced in the Georgian language orally even before the spread of Christianity to Georgia and part of this vocabulary, after the spread of Christianity, borrowed into the Georgian language and literature from Greek, Armenian and Syriac through oral and literary means, some of which are still actively used in modern literary Georgian language and dialects.
A certain part of the presented material had previously been superficially studied by scholars and scattered across various publications of “The Martyrdom” or collections of scientific works. For the first time, we collected existing research materials, processed them, corrected errors and added new etymological material, which allowed us to present a full-fledged scientific study that will help researchers of ancient Georgian literature to better assess the importance and place of “The Martyrdom of Queen Shushanik” in the historical process of the further development of Georgian literature.
Keywords: Old Georgian Literature, Etymology, Semantics