სიტყვარი – ქართული ტექნიკური ტერმინოლოგიის პირველი ლექსიკონი – 100 წლისაა

ანოტაცია

1918 to 1921, the years of Georgia’s independence of Georgia after the establishing of the first Republic of Georgia brought Georgian patriots not only great joy but also great responsibility. To maintain independence and promote further development demanded hard and rational work. As soon as the independence of Georgia was announced, working on the problems of the Georgian language became a high priority task. The history of Georgia has confirmed clearly the universal truth that a strong country needs to have its own scientific language in order to progress down the road of development.

Creating one’s own language terminology did not mean simply transcribing foreign terms into Georgian or adding of native prefixes and suffixes to roots coming from foreign languages. In the previous century, the foreign words were rooted into the Georgian language artificially and there were even strong restrictions against using the native language. “If now, in this critically important moment, we cannot manage to educate people in Georgian, to deliver the terminology of as many branches as possible in our native language, it means to give people stone instead of bread, and the people will conclusively believe that to get any knowledge and moreover to study any science is unachievable for them; thus our people will lose the wish and hope to achieve good, deep knowledge.”

The three years of independence turned to be very fruitful in this direction.

Starting from as early as 1918, the work on creating the terminology of the technical sciences in Georgian started. This work was led by the technical society of Georgia.

In the first half of August 1919, the terminological section of the Georgian Technical Society finished its work on the first bilingual (Russian-Georgian) Dictionary of Technical Terms, which was published in 1920. A ten-page-long terminological glossary of gymnastics, compiled by Giorgi Nikoladze, was added to this dictionary under the title “Terminology for the ‘Shevardeni’ society”.

The authors of the dictionary were Vasil Kakabadze, Giorgi Gedevanishvili, Rusudan Nikoladze, Giorgi Nikoladze, David Berekashvili, Irakli Mchedlishvili, Ivane Beridze and Mikheil Shalamberidze. All of them fully realized that their work was a matter of the national importance.“Terminology cannot be changed every year,” it said in the notes. “This is the kind of work that would be useful for generations and it should be thought over very deliberately and based on the reliable foundation.”

Why were the authors of the first Georgian Technical Dictionary called “purists”? Because in the dictionary they compiled, the majority of the terms represented were Georgian, which was a result of their belief that only the terms based on native word roots could enrich the native language and be useful. They advanced the following arguments defending their viewpoint:

1. International, i.e., such terminology as would be common and all-inclusive for every language, does not exist, it cannot be expected to appear and even if it could ever appear, it would always remain impossible to succeed in the absolute understanding and confluence of the branches of science in every country.

2. The Georgian language is “a type of language absolutely different from all the other languages around the world”; Indo-European nouns are absolutely inorganic for it.

3. When creating terminology, first of all, the characteristic features of the native language should be considered.

4. The simplest way is just to make a transliteration; this does not request any kind of scientific work or investigation. But this way is not the right way.

Thus, the view of terminological work was based on the steadily scientific principles; The authors of the dictionary were the first to put forward the necessity of creating a terminology center. An article published in a Georgian newspaper, in 1918, by Rusudan Nikoladze, deals with terminology problems as an issue of state concern and deliberately discusses the necessity of founding a terminological centre in Georgia.

Creating a new basis and new roots for the language is the only true way to enrich the language since each of those roots has its own importance and will give birth to new “generations” – new native words for the language; this is the way the dictionary’s authors thought about terminological work.

The methods of the terminological work were as follows:

1. First of all, they tried to find correspondences for modern technical terms among the existing vocabulary of the language;

2. Examples were used from the European (Russian, French, German, and English) languages.

3. They created new words based in the Georgian language word roots (neologisms).

Their scientific views and approaches were rejected at the the start of the Soviet era. The Georgian rooted terms were quickly replaced with Latin rooted ones. Thus, a great many terms were preserved only in the first Georgian Terminological Dictionary as a historical document. This dictionary never became the object of the scientific studies. It is now being decided and planned to publish the first Georgian Terminological Dictionary this year—on its 100th anniversary. This is the dictionary from which the history of Georgian terminology begins.

It is obvious that in the Georgian scientific language of the 21st century, Latin words represent the bulk of the terminology. Latin terms are again replacing the Georgian rooted ones, just like it had happened once before when terms coming from the vocabulary of Oriental languages intruded into Georgian. The condition in which the contemporary Georgian language finds itself leads to only one conclusion: the creative  work of the “Georgian purists” served to preserve the roots and stems of native origin, but, sadly, the modern situation shows us that everything is the same as a hundred years ago, as it is mentioned in the dictionary: “Unfortunately, it can be said that against the background of foreign words, the notions expressed in the native language are not “in favor” and notions expressed in the foreign terms which are mostly hard to understand seem to be untouchable, like gods from Olympus.” But if we take into consideration the fact that so-called international words are not really international or “all-national” (found only in two or three languages), and, besides that, if we gain a closer familiarity with the European or Eastern countries’ scientific terminology, we will be able to look differently at the essence of the Georgian terminological work fulfilled a century ago – we will become certain that the methodology chosen by Georgian terminological workers a hundred years ago was in its essense of both national and European character at the same time.