Between Kartvelian Heritage and the Vestiges of the Steppe Nomads: Compound Verbs in Old Georgian

by Hélène Gérardin

Compound verbs are constructions consisting of a verb and a noun with a number of distinctive properties, much like the English expressions to take notice and to get rid. They are encountered in large numbers in the earliest Georgian manuscripts. Yet they mysteriously disappear towards the end of the Middle Ages, leaving no trace in the other Kartvelian languages. What, then, became of compound verbs in Georgian?

Known in contemporary linguistics as “complex predicates”, compound verbs combine a verb with a relatively vague meaning (e.g. ‘to do’, ‘to put’, ‘to have’, ‘to give’) with a noun carrying a more specific meaning, which has lost some of its nominal properties. English contains a large number of such constructions. In expressions such as to take advantage or to bear witness, for example, the absence of an article before the noun and the loss of the verbs’ original lexical meanings reflect the highly distinctive nature of these constructions.

Georgian compound verbs likewise possess grammatical properties that distinguish them from ordinary verbs. The noun displays irregular case marking, the negative marker attaches to the noun rather than the verb, and word order is fixed, whereas it is otherwise free throughout the language. The following sentence, taken from The Martyrdom of Saint Shushanik, illustrates two compound verbs:

შენ      ღმერთი         ჭეშმარიტი    უარ                ჰყავ    

šen      γmerti             č’ešmarit’i      uar                  hq’av

you       God                 true                 negation          you_did

და       ცეცხლსა       თაყუანის      ეც.

da        cecxlsa            taq’uanis        ec

and         to_fire             worship        you_hit

‘You have renounced the true God and worshipped fire.’

Constructions of this kind are extremely common in Old and Middle Georgian. They occur not only in religious texts translated from other languages but also in originally Georgian literary, legal and historical works. Since they are likewise widespread in neighbouring unrelated languages, notably Persian, Turkish, Armenian, Azeri, and Ossetian, it is tempting to attribute them to Iranian influence, or at least to an areal phenomenon. Closer examination, however, shows that the issue is far more complex.

Persian influence can first be ruled out. It was precisely during the period of Persian domination that compound verbs disappeared from Georgian texts, never to reappear. Moreover, at the time of the earliest contacts between Georgian and Persian, the system was not yet fully developed in Persian itself.

The Armenian parallels are likewise limited. Compound verbs are considerably less numerous and less varied in Armenian than in Georgian. Furthermore, comparison of Armenian and Georgian versions of the same texts reveals that Armenian compound verbs are consistently translated by Georgian compound verbs, whereas the converse is not always true. This suggests that these constructions were more widespread and more deeply integrated into Georgian than into Armenian.

One may still hypothesise an earlier Iranian origin by looking to the Scythians, nomadic speakers of Indo-Iranian languages who reached the Caucasus in Antiquity. After settling there, the Scythian kingdoms developed close ties with the Georgian kingdoms. Since the Scythians left no written records of their languages, the only surviving witness available today is Ossetian. This Iranian language, which has been in contact with Georgian for many centuries, does indeed possess a rich inventory of compound verbs. Their grammatical behaviour, however, differs significantly from that found in the other Iranian languages.

Given the current state of research, it is impossible to trace the origin of this phenomenon any further. Although Georgian cannot have borrowed it from any of the neighbouring languages discussed above, it cannot be ruled out that Georgian itself was its source. We must therefore look for an internal explanation: a legacy inherited from Proto-Kartvelian. The other Kartvelian languages do not appear to preserve any traces of complex predicates; nevertheless, it is well established that Proto-Kartvelian morphology was originally fusional. This may explain the coexistence of compound verb formation (an older process dating from a period of more fusional morphology) and agglutinative morphology, a later development resulting from prolonged areal contact. Whatever the outcome, researchers will need more time to unravel this mystery, one that promises to shed new light on the history of the ancient peoples of the Caucasus.

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