Prof. George Hewitt

Review of Georgij A. Klimov Etymological Dictionary of the Kartvelian Languages

Review of Georgij A. Klimov Etymological Dictionary of the Kartvelian Languages (Trends in Linguistics, Documentation 16, Mouton De Gruyter, xv + 504 pages, 1998), in BSOAS

This attractive volume represents in English translation an updated version  of the author's 1964 306-page similarly titled Russian original. Sadly, Klimov did  not quite live to see his translation through to publication, but there can be little doubt that it will long serve as a fitting memorial to a distinguished all-round linguist who throughout his career made significant contributions to Caucasian (especially Kartvelian) studies, being a rarity among Russian (actually half-Russian, half-German) Caucasologists in having mastered both written and spoken Georgian.  It is substantially the author's own English rendition that is here presented, and it largely reads most fluently; apart from an occasional lapse in morphology (e.g. 'secondarity' for 'secondary nature'; 'derivatory' for 'derivational'; addition of unnecessary suffix '-ic'  in such phrases as 'present(ic)/aorist(ic) [tenses]'), the one recurring stylistic oddity  is over-use of the impersonal active for impersonal passive construction  (e.g. 'One has [= It has been] proposed that..'). American spellings tend to be used (though we have 'plough'), and glottalisation is marked by subscript dot -- when not directly quoting,  I use the more normal apostrophe.

The full text in PDF can be downloaded by clicking here

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