ტერ­მინ­თა პრობ­ლე­მა ქარ­თულ ჟეს­ტურ ენა­ში

ანოტაცია

The deaf and hard of hearing people are the linguistic minority in Georgia, whose biggest problem is lack of communication. The state tries to solve their problems with the proper laws. The law "About Social Protection of Disabled Persons" says: "The State recognizes the sign language as the means for inter-person relationship and guarantees to provide the necessary conditions for its usage and development” (Article 15). Usually the sign languages are used by the deaf and hard of hearing people all over the world. The state organizations should provide such citizens by the interpreters from the sign languages. It’s also important that some changes were made in educational law: “In the specialized schools of sensor disabilities where the deaf and hard of hearing pupils receive the education the sign language is used and its analogs.” (15.12. 2010. N4042; Georgian Education Law, article 4. The language of teaching) In order to overcome the problem of communication for the deaf and hard of hearing people, it is necessary to provide the scientific investigations of Georgian sign language, to learn its grammar providing the detailed analysis for the each grammatical category, creating the dictionaries, finding out the norms for this language, defining the language levels, working on the methodology of teaching Georgian sign language, etc. The most important goal is to have a dictionary of Georgian sign language with the investigated terminology for different fields.

Usually the deaf people are very creative and often they are inventing the signs, and their family members use these individual signs don’t knowing the existed sign language in their country. Such people can’t communicate with the other members of the deaf community in Georgia and they stay isolated because of communication problem. That’s why it’s very important for the deaf and hard of hearing people to know the sign language and to be the full right members of their own community. Usually these people are bilingual using both languages - spoken and sign. Taking into consideration all aforementioned lexical and terminology problems are very important for these people. Many leading Universities are investigating and teaching the sign languages worldwide and it’s a very pity that till now we have a very few number of books about the Georgian sign language.

In the Soviet period the sign languages were under the influence of Russian. This Russian influence is easy to find in the old Georgian dactyl alphabet, which was totally based on the Russian one and in the lexical units as well. From one hand the deaf people could communicate in this “Soviet sign language” and they care to keep this possibility, but from another hand the process of nationalization began everywhere in post Soviet space and the sign languages are reintegrating. Although the grammar of Georgian sign language was free from the Russian elements unlike the lexical level, but this process of reintegration is better reflected on the lexical level of the language.

While working on the dictionary of the Georgian sign language we’ll need to have some special efforts for terminology as this language has a very poor number of the sign units - as terms and in this regard, there are the problems in each field, starting form the school textbooks and including the professional terminology. The scientific typological research accompanied with some creative works should be performed together with the language sources for the each term in order to select the final versions for any concrete case.