ტერმინოლოგია ‒ ქართული ენის ხვალინდელი დღე

ანოტაცია

It has been known that the literary language directly depends on the development of the scientific language. If the scientific societies care about the language, create the terms on the basis of the living language or the sources of the Old Georgian Literature, the language is developing on the right track, and many terms become a natural part of the literary language. In other words, when the scientific language is duly developed, the credit goes to the scientific circles and when it declines, this is the result of insufficient efforts. During the last twenty years, the events that took place in Georgia seriously harmed the Georgian terminology and correspondingly, jeopardized the development of the Georgian scientific language.

Terminological work in Georgia has its long history, but it has not been studied thoroughly yet. Maybe it is the cause that the question of distinguishing several terminological schools has never been raised. To my mind, on the basis of the clearly outlined scientific approaches, courses of action, we can mark out four different schools in the Georgian terminological studies: 1. schools of the X-XII centuries, 2. Ilia Chavchavadze and his contemporaries; 3. The so-called word-ists; 4. the Soviet period.

What kind should the Georgian terminology be? 1. Georgian; 2. Partly Georgian and partly international; 3. International – this is the main issue of debates which always existed and will exist in the future. It is significant for us to find out which of the mentioned principles proved to be more useful for the language, and which of them proved to be the right way to follow. Today, with the help of modern research, it is easy to study the whole history of the Georgian terminology and draw certain conclusions.

It is well known that in the Soviet era the language and subject matter in the fields of theatre, cinema, literature, history, linguistics and the dissertation theses of all branches of science as well. Thorough historical studies will enable us to define which part of such approaches was useful and which was harmful, reflecting only the directives of the Soviet ideology. The sphere of terminology, by its character, cannot avoid some political influence. We should not neglect this reality when studying the history of separate terms or terminology in general.

Nowadays, we have a situation in the field of terminological work
which can be referred as really alarming. On one side, the terms are created, even very good terms, but they are not implemented; on the other side, the language is contaminated with foreign words. The scientific language does not lag behind the language of the mass media, from this viewpoint. Such a flood of foreign terms threatens the Georgian language, which managed to overcome the attacks of the Turkish, Persian and Russian languages, though with great difficulties. Existing (sometimes from the earlier periods) terms are replaced by the foreign words. There is no need to introduce such foreign terms as “preverb”, “adverb”, “correlate”, and so on. Beginning from the end of the 20th century, we observe the development of a strange, unnatural language which can be called the “international Georgian”. Many linguists notice that many talk about it, but unfortunately, everyone tries to solve such problems individually. There are terminological groups in every university, and even more, every bank has its own terminological stylist redactor; the authors of the manuals and textbooks use any kind of terms as they like. It is impossible to get used to such a situation, which surely cannot bring a unified terminology as a
result.

The Georgian language is exposed to another kind of threat too. The
villages all over the territory of Georgia are almost emptied of population thus, the Georgian dialects, the living colloquial language which has always been the source of the literary language, are endangered. Thus, nowadays there exists special need in correct Georgian terminology, correct scientific language. Our terminological schools should not turn off the determined ways of terminological work and there is no need to invent new strange terms or copy foreign ones. The way of the Georgian terminology, in our opinion, is implementing novelty based on terminological traditions.