Georgians have a language almost nobody outside their country understands and it is written in a script called Mkhedruli. With the possible exception of Mordor, it is uniquely used for the Georgian languages (yes, there are more than one) and few people other than the speakers of those languages can make anything of it. The origins of the alphabet are obscure and there is some controversy whether or not it is invented by Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian scholar who had a habit of inventing alphabets on the fly. Most Georgians say not.
(I made this up)
I’ve undertaken a modest effort to try and learn the Georgian script. Often when walking through the city, my eyes wander around and I try to decode texts that I see. One day when I walked through Barnov Street, I could make out four letters in a boutique window: ო დ რ ი and I figured it was ‘odri’. That didn’t make much sense but then, almost nothing in Georgian would make much sense to me. Then I noticed an English name in the window: Audrey, and once again I realised how very satisfying it is if something clicks when you learn something new.
Other words I came across:
Tibisi = TBC bank.
Viski = Whisky
Aisi = Icy (Georgian beer)
Proper nouns and loan words are good examples of why learning a foreign alphabet is a good idea even if you can’t speak the language itself. When travelling around the former Soviet republics in the past, I found it very useful to have learnt the Cyrillic alphabet in order to decipher geographical names, read the menu, or indeed, find the toilet (туалет, or ‘tualet’, in Russian). Cyrillic, of course, has the additional benefit in that it is used for many other languages, including exotic ones like Mongolian and some others that I forgot.
The order of the letters in the Mkhedruli alphabet is based on the Greek alphabet and the consonants that have no Greek equivalent come at the end. These are the ones that represent all those guttural and hissing sounds that make little or no sense to most foreigners and I must admit that I don’t know all of them. The alphabet consists of 33 letters, but I think 20 or so would have been quite adequate.
Peter on the move 