The Lexical Links Between Georgian and Chechen
Chechen belongs to the Northeast Caucasian language family, and together with closely-related Ingush and the more distant Bats, forms the Nakh branch. Georgian, on the other hand, belongs to the Kartvelian, or South Caucasian language family, along with Mingrelian, Laz, and Svan. The other indigenous language family of the Caucasus, Northwest Caucasian, includes Circassian, Abkhaz, and others. Thus far, no linguists have provided sufficiently convincing evidence to all that any of these three language families are related to each other — we must assume, therefore, that all three are autochthonous to the region, and have been living side by side for millennia.
That does not mean, however, that words don’t travel between language families. And for a speaker of Georgian, certain Chechen words may look familiar. Let’s take a look at a few examples.
Here are the days of the week in Chechen:
Now, here they are in Georgian:
If you’re thinking that some of them look familiar, you’d be right:
Orshabati → orshot — Monday
P’arask’evi → p’eeraska — Friday
Shabati → shota — Saturday
K’vira → k’ira — Sunday
So did Chechen borrow some names for the days of the week from Georgian, or vice versa? The answer becomes more clear when we look at Chechen and Georgian numbers.
Georgian orshabati (Monday) translates literally to “two [days] after Saturday (shabati).” Tuesday, samshabati, is “three [days] after Saturday,” etc. Armenian uses the same system:
Armenian yerk’ushabti (Monday), just like Georgian translates to “two [days] after Saturday (shabti).” Both Armenian and Georgian borrowed this construction — or calqued — from Biblical Greek.
Thus, certain Chechen days of the week are ultimately derived from Greek and Hebrew. But beyond these terms, Chechen has also borrowed some other interesting words:
Indeed, these loanwords provide a fascinating window eight hundred years into Chechnya’s past, when the Georgian Queen Tamar (1184 AD — 1212 AD) ruled over her kingdom’s golden age. According to Amjad Jaimoukha, it was during the age of Queen Tamar that Tbilisi’s political influence — and that of the Georgian Orthodox Church — reached its height and Georgian missionaries pushed into the North Caucasus seeking new converts.
This is not to say that the Georgian missionaries enjoyed overwhelming success. To the extent Christianity was practiced in Chechnya, it likely occurred in tandem with older pagan beliefs.
The Txaba-Yerdy Church, in modern-day Ingushetia, is an interesting example of this syncretism. Originally built in the 8th or 9th century, the church underwent a massive renovation during the reign of Queen Tamar. What likely started as a pagan temple became a medieval church.
After the invasion of the Mongols, Georgians — and Christianity — retreated from Nakh-speaking territory. Chechnya reverted to paganism until the 16th century when Islam gained traction. Few tangible relics, like Txaba-Yerdy, remain.
There are other Kartvelian words in Chechen, older perhaps, that are more mysterious:
Chechen has another word for dog, phwu, which has a cognate in the Bats language: pħu. This suggests, according to Johanna Nichols, that the Georgian term for “dog” was borrowed into a Nakh dialect that has subsequently disappeared. Perhaps it was originally a term for a specific breed that then came to denote “dogs” in general. The older, and presumably Nakh term for dog has now taken on a different meaning; Ingush pwu and Chechen phwu now denote a “male” or “large” dog.
There are fewer Nakh loanwords in standard Georgian, but several important Georgian dialects — Khevsur and Tush — show clear signs of influence from Nakh-Daghestanian languages. For example, Thomas Wier, lists the following loanwords in Khevsur and Tush:
Some of these featured in Host and Guest, by one of Georgia’s greatest poets, Vazha-Pshavela. The epic poem, written in 1893, takes place in a region where Chechen Kists and Georgian highlanders live next to, and fight, each other. (Translation taken from Lela Jgerenaia’s English version).
Moreover, according to Thomas Wier, it is possible that a few constructions in Khevsur and Tush, such as double-cases in Khevsur (ik-it-it), are calqued from Nakh-Daghestanian, since many Khevsur and Tush “were also presumably bilingual in one or more other Nakh-Daghestanian language.”
John Lechner writes on the history, politics, and languages of Russia, the Caucasus, Turkey, and Central Africa. You can find him here on Twitter.
