Reviewed by Thomas R. Wier, University of Chicago

Among linguists, the Georgian language is famously complex and even more notorious for its typologically unusual features. Tamar Makharoblidze’s book is intended to demonstrate that complexity in a companion to her teaching guide, Basic Georgian. This volume is thus not primarily intended for people who already have some spoken or theoretical expertise in the language but rather for an English-speaking audience with little or no background in Georgian.

As such, this book takes the reader on a crash course of Georgian grammar: nominal and pronominal morphology, postpositional phrases and adverbial modifiers, verbal polypersonalism, the peculiarities of tense/aspect formation in Georgian with particular reference to thematic suffixes, (the nonintuitive properties of) inversion in perfect evidential constructions, the distinctions between transitive and intransitive verbs (as well as both unaccusative and unergative conjugations, although those terms are not used), the causative construction, and, finally, this volume finishes with full conjugations of a number of the most intransigent irregular verbs.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this book as either a beginning student’s guide or as a desk reference for more advanced students or scholars of the language for many reasons. The first and most important reason is that many highly unintuitive aspects of the language are introduced very early, long before more straightforward aspects have been discussed. For example, statistically marginal deponent constructions of agentive intransitive predicates such as m-a-k’ank’al-eb-s (1sg-caus-shiver-th-3sg; in which th is an abbreviation for thematic suffix) ‘I shiver’, which have the morphosyntax of transitive causative verbs, are introduced on page 16, although understanding such examples requires knowledge of the highly complex verbal subject and object agreement that is introduced on page 42. Some aspects of Georgian grammar that are the most interesting for theorists are the most obscure for language-learners, such as the system of case-marking, which demonstrates splits in each of three series (Subj[Nom]~IO[Dat]~DO[Dat] in present, Subj[Erg]~IO[Dat]~DO[Nom] in aorist, and Subj[Dat]~IO[postposition]~DO[Nom] in the perfect) and across different classes of verb conjugations (e.g. unaccusatives behave differently from unergatives), never receive an adequate treatment or even a graphical summary as provided by Howard I Aronson (1990; Georgian: A reading grammar) or B. G. Hewitt (1995; A structural reference grammar of Georgian).

What is more troubling is not merely a confusing and convoluted discussion of concepts the author wants to convey (the prose style is sometimes truly difficult to parse and how paragraphs link together is not always clear), but that M, a native speaker of Georgian, sometimes makes major errors of analysis. For example, in her discussion of inversion, which appears to treat an agent as an indirect object with dative case and object agreement, M says “In [the perfect series], ONLY transitive verbs have inversion’ (emphasis in the original; 48). In fact, all unergative intransitive verbs (M’s medioactive verbs) also undergo inversion in the perfect, and depending on the analysis, so do dative constructions such as m-i-qvar-s (1sg-prv-love-3sg; in which prv is an abbreviation for pre-radical vowel) ‘I love her’ (Alice C Harris [1981; Georgian syntax: A study in relational grammar]). Furthermore, M often makes dubious assertions about the historical origin of constructions, as when she claims the ergative suffix -m/-ma in Georgian descends from a Proto-Kartvelian word for ‘man’ (as in the Svan word māre), whereas its Mingrelian counterpart -k supposedly stems from a different word for ‘man’ (k’oči in Mingrelian). Needless to say, M’s ruminations on ergativity in Basque are beside the point.

Ultimately, though, all theoretical debates are also beside the point. Without exaggeration, almost every page manifests some flaw in prose style or awkward or incoherent phrasing, sometimes almost oracular in nature. For example, ‘We expose the universal regulation: the semantics of the class-category is also universal’ (25); or non-English on inconsistently spelled terminology (e.g. ‘vocals’ instead of ‘vowels’, using serya rather than ‘series’, raghatsam but raghacam ‘something (nonspecific)’ three lines later [17]); or misspelled or ungrammatical English explanations of complex and unusual phenomena. This is not a book that a scholar, much less a beginning student, will be able to make heads or tails of.