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SOCIETY
GEORGIA TODAY
APRIL 7 - 10, 2017
The Nart Saga Adapted for Children & Published in Georgian BY NINO GUGUNISHVILI
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resentations of the “Nart Saga for Children” in Georgian and Ossetian, and the third edition of the Georgian-Ossetian and Ossetian-Georgian Dictionaries, were held at Tbilisi State University on April 3. Both projects were published by Caucasus Mosaic, a non-governmental organization, with the assistance of the European Union (EU) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). The Nart Saga for Children is published for the first time in Georgian, as an adapted version of the ancient Caucasus Epos. The book is illustrated by Georgian and Ossetian artists and will be distributed in schools and libraries throughout Tbilisi and Tskhinvali. The Georgian-Ossetian and OssetianGeorgian dictionaries were first published in 2012 with the help of the EU and UNDP. Following their success, the third amended edition of the dictionaries was published in 2016. The presentation event gathered representatives of civil society, Georgian government, scholars and international organizations. “I want to congratulate our Georgian and Ossetian Research Center at the Tbilisi State University,” said Mikheil Chkhenkeli, Vice Rector of Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, going on to thank all those involved in supporting the project. “I also want to emphasize
the importance of the Nart Saga for Children being translated into Georgian and the publication of the dictionaries, and to recognize the enormous efforts made by Dr. Naira Bepieva [Caucasus Mosaic NGO] while preparing them for publication. Events like this, be they academic, research, or cultural, ensure the peaceful environment we are striving for,” he concluded. “As our two languages developed and changed, the need to publish a new Georgian-Ossetian dictionary became obvious,” said Dr. Bepieva. “There never was an Ossetian-Georgian dictionary [until ours]. Together, we, Georgians and Ossetians, accomplished that great mission”. She then talked about the Nart Saga for Children, adapted for younger audiences for the first time. “The Nart Saga Epos is a treasure of the Caucasus; where you can find all the highest ideals and values of humanism, hospitality, love, and friendship; things which should be taught to children from a very early age,” she said. Shombi Sharp, Head of the UNDP in Georgia, spoke about the joint EU - UNDP COBERM initiative that was launched in 2010, aiming to promote peace and confidence between peoples across division lines. He, too, stressed the importance of the publication of the dictionaries and Nart Saga. “I’m very happy that through this project we have been able to do something for children, something very particular,” said Caroline Stampfer, Project Manager at the Delegation of the EU to Georgia. “Books are a vital part of my life and are
also very important in relations with my own children,” she said.
The presentation was rounded up with a performance from popular Georgian
singer Irma Sokhadze and a concert of the folk music band Mtiebi.
Thomas Wier, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Free University of Tbilisi, answering a question regarding the difference between Georgian and Ossetian on Quora.com: “Linguistically, Georgian and Ossetian belong to two entirely unrelated language families: Kartvelian and IndoEuropean (on its Iranian branch), respectively. Although the Kartvelian languages have been situated in the Caucasus since time immemorial (at least since the early Bronze Age), the Ossetians arrived there in classical antiquity as an off-shoot of an eastern
subbranch of the Iranian family within Indo-European (IE). Ossetian is specifically most closely related to Yaghnobi, a language spoken in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan. They are in fact the last remnants of the ancient Scythian nomads who roamed the western and central steppe more than two thousand years ago. So, despite centuries of geographic proximity, they originally come from totally different parts of Eurasia.
from its IE origins. Unlike most other IE languages but like Georgian, Ossetic has lost all grammatical genders. Ossetic has also entirely lost its original IE case paradigm system, in which suffixes combined number and case in a single affix. Ossetic has instead innovated an almost entirely new system with a discrete number suffix followed by one of nine case suffixes (again, mostly unknown in IE). See his full answer here: https://www. quora.com/How-different-are-the-Ossetianand-Georgian-languages-and-what-are-theirorigins
GRAMMATICAL (IN) CONGRUITIES In many ways, Ossetic has drifted far
We Are How We Drive OP-ED BY NUGZAR B. RUHADZE
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fficial statistics have it that around 600 people die every year in Georgia and more than 10,000 are injured as a consequence of road accidents. The way Georgians drive their cars has no connection to our concept of Western civilization. We want to travel to Europe visa free, and blindly believe that we deserve that much freedom of movement, yet most of our drivers are so wild and barbaric that they deserve to drive nothing more than a cart with a pair of yoked bulls; certainly not a modern car. We are like savages at the wheel, with the exclusion of a few scared novices who have just gotten out of one of those outrageous driving schools in town. The entire driving system in Georgia is a typical paradigm of chaos, within which neurotic wheel-holders speed along, blind to the potentially lifethreatening mannerisms of their driving. I can hardly find an epithet that could describe the driving pattern in Georgia, except one: Aggressive! Yes, we are a nation of aggressive drivers, both male and female, who hurry even when they are not late; who are nervous when they have no reason to be; who breach the rules without reason; who overtake when not allowed to; who use the horn unnecessarily; who flash your rear view mirror with high beam
to get you out of the way when there is really nowhere for you to go; who force you into an almost guaranteed accident while there is no exigency to change lane; who simply hate you…just because you are ahead of them on the road. The human irritation and aggression on the streets of Georgia has no limits, and there is no law or regulation which could check the hell. Judging by the traf-
fic picture, this country is a real cuckoo’s nest within which inmates have no recognition of each other as human beings, nor that there are rules that need to be observed. As anywhere else in the world, traffic in Georgia has three main dimensions – driver, car and road – and of those three, drivers are mad, cars are bad and roads need mending. Aggressive driving is a
custom here. Moreover, we are a nation of irrelevantly proud individuals who believe we have to be aggressive, especially when at the wheel, in order to feel ourselves internally content and at one with the world. And the worst part of this is that we have no chance to change because aggressiveness is our second nature. We usually turn a blind eye to this malicious feature of our character and
take it all in our stride, but we must not, because our unbridled aggressiveness and proclivity for undue speed on the road is directly connected with the loss of thousands of human lives – unexpected, unnecessary and unjustified!!! What can be done? It starts in the childhood of those whose character is molded in families and among peers in schools and on the streets, where aggressiveness is a norm, meaning the tendency to drive aggressively seeps into our veins in our very adolescence, if not before. So, nothing will change unless society, all society, changes at the roots and takes on the correct upbringing of future generations based on better values of civilization – both Western and Eastern. It goes without saying that an adult who learns to drive with a-priori accumulated aggressiveness in character will never be able to act as a calm, balanced, tolerant and defensive driver because aggressiveness was instilled in the character of that person over years, something needing more than a night to extract. I have no reason at this moment to squeeze even an iota of optimism out of my speaking apparatus to say that we will improve any time soon. It will perhaps take scores of years to change our modus operandi at the wheel. For the time being, we will have to handle the situation with the most stringent laws and their strictest possible enforcement if we want to save lives for this dwindling nation.