It was recently brought to my attention that the Georgians use the expression of "my liver" to mean "my love" or "my dear", which is exactly how Persians and Central Asians use the word. Here are a few thoughts on the subject.
The proper attribution of "jigari", liver in Georgian, is most likely Indo-Iranian, and the body part, "liver" has about as many expressions in Turkic or Persian/Tajik as the Arabic word "qalb" or Indo-Iranian word "del" for heart. This is just another example of how Georgia is, in my non-standard view, much closer culturally to the Middle East and South/Central Asia than to Southeastern Europe or Russia.
You can see a few of these "expressions of the liver" in easy to read cyrillic if you go to the j section of this excellent Tajik-English dictionary, which I might add was composed by American missionaries with the foresight to combine their firsthand linguistic experiences in Tajikistan with their research of standard Russian and Persian language references. There, you will see the entry for "jigaram" meaning literally, my liver, or metaphorically, my beloved. Another interesting entry is "jigarresh" which means literally, to tear the liver, or metaphorically, tormented. And, the atrributive form of jigar in Persian, "jigari", is one of the words Persians and Tajiks use to denote the color brown. The other commonly used word for brown in the region is "qahvagi" or "qahverang", which is very similar to the Georgian word for brown, "qavisperi". Both words take the Arabic word for coffee, "qahva", and add their own respective word for color. In Persian, this would be "rang", and in Georgian, this is "peri".
In contrast, liver in Azerbaijani is "ciyar" (see c entries in this Azerbaijani-English dictionary). Although that doesn't quite look like "jigar", remember that "c" is the same thing as "j" in southern Turkic, and also consider that hard, back-of-the-mouth consonants like "g" or "k" stuck between two frontal vowels must necessarily change to soft frontal consonants like "y" or "d" in vowel-harmonic Turkic languages. With those two grammatical insights, then "ciyar" begins to look a lot like "jigar". In contrast, the Uzbek word for liver is "chistiy" Persian/Tajik (see "j" entries here).
Given that both Uzbeks and Georgians use the word "jigar" in the figurative sense, it's highly likely that the southern Turks have the same use of the word, in particular, the Azeris. The question then becomes, how did the figurative use of this word "jigar" diffuse over the Arab/Persian/Mongol/Turkic satrapies? This is the more interesting (and more difficult question) and one that I wish linguists/anthropologists would spend more time researching, as opposed to testing some abstruse theory of a language's internal logic or structure.
For example, take the words "magazine" in French, "magazin" in Russian, "maghazini" in Georgian, and "makhzan" in Persian. Now let us assume for a second that the Arabic word "makahze", meaning store or supply, is the origin of all these variations in the Indo-European and Caucasian languages. Given this, you could have three possible hypotheses of how the Georgians acquired the word makhaze: (1) they acquired it from the Arabs; (2) they acquired it from the Arabs by way of the Persians; (3) they acquired it from the Arabs by way of the Russians who in turn acquired the word by way of the French who in turn acquired the word by way of Moorish Spanish or Arabicized Sicilian-Italians.
Now, if you were to simply look at those words, the Georgian word looks a lot closer to the Russian and French than to the Arabic. Tom would point out the flaw in this non-linguist reasoning and show that his academic brethren could come up with some intrinsic rule for Arabic to Georgian language diffusion showing that "kh" in Arabic
transforms to "gh" in Georgian and that this "testable theory" would somehow evidence that the Georgian word is actually closer to the Arabic word. That's good and all if there's sufficient evidence to support the linguist's theory. Unfortunately, there rarely is.
In my view, the more reliable testing method is Bayesian in nature and requires the linguist to leave his comfort zone of theorized linguistic relationships, most of which are nearly impossible to test due to their generality, and to rely instead on the real-world anthropological/archaeological evidence that supports certain versions of language diffusion. Maybe I'm naive and not sufficiently educated in linguistic empirical testing methodology to see the complexity in trying to separate the various covariances in a data set that would obviously be correlated with other significant unknowns. That said, I think that if more linguists studied seemingly unrelated languages like Arabic and Georgian -- and not just the languages themselves but the cultural contexts in which those languages operate -- at a level sufficient to work with them, that they could develop some fairly reliable probabilities of the means by which the Georgians acquired, for example, the Arabic word "makhaze" (or perhaps vice versa, because I'm positive there are classic Caucasian words in Arabic and Aramaic/Syriac, though these probably would have entered much earlier than the Ummayad conquest).
My issue with the linguistic profession is that I rarely come across linguists these days who bother to collect the necessary real-world data to develop reliable estimates. In that regard, I have a much higher regard for Soviet linguists because many did attempt to acquire these data firsthand by living and working in the
linguistically-diverse regions of the Soviet Union, in particular, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Granted, Americans couldn't really do this for most of the 20th century, but they can now, and I don't exactly see US linguists on NSF or State Department grants dying to rough it out in the Pamirs or the Upper Caucasus gathering either historical or present-day data on physically isolated languages that reach back millenia.
Sadly, many of these languages are on the verge of extinction, especially with the economic migration of Caucasians and Central Asians to Russia and with the neverending conflict on the Georgian-Russian and Tajik-Afghan borders, so there's very little time left for any researcher to gather sufficient data to test larger
theories concerning the origin of exotic languages such as Svan or Pamiri. The only hope, I think, is to pique the linguistic interest of more Caucasians and Central Asians, and give them opportunities to study foreign languages besides English, German and French and for reasons other than economics.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
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5 comments:
Hi again Brian,
Probably someone has answered all these questions, but since they are relatively trivial, they are buried in stacks of articles and you would not find the answer immediately without consulting experts. As concerns 'magasin', etc., yes, the origin would seem to have to be arabic, due to its production from kh-z-n triliteral verbal root with ma- participial prefix. The Russian certainly came late from French. The Georgian came directly from Arabic or Farsi, otherwise it easily would have borrowed French, Russ, Ital -g- as -g-, not fricative -gh-. But probably you know all that. As to whether it came directly from Farsi or Arabic, I don't know, but I don't doubt there is a Georgian philologist who does. It would have been borrowed in the period of the written language, so it should be reasonably trackable.
As for liver, the PIE is *yekw-r- which was ya:kare in Avestan. This initial ya- became ji- in Farsi (I think as a general rule, but I am not an expert), so we get jigar. The origin must be specifically Iranian. I could not possibly answer where they started using it for a beloved person (though perhaps someone has), but if this is common in Farsi and the word originated in Farsi, then I really doubt they brought the word to Azeris or Georgians or other Caucasians and Turkics and then borrowed this use from them. Of course there could be a number of home-grown uses in any language, especially Tajik where it would be an ancient lexeme. This might indeed not be well-studied, but it is not because linguists are sloppy, though there are some who might not admit their ignorance. It is just not interesting enough to most people to warrant a comprehensive study.
I agree with you about Georgian being culturally more Middle Eastern, for whatever my view is worth, never having been there. And no doubt that while most Georgians might not like that, the Russians would agree :) But this culture is partly borrowed. However, in more ancient times, they undoubtedly had deeper and long-standing contacts with the Indo-Europeans than with Semites, Altaic peoples, etc. Yes, yes, I know, Iranians are Indo-Europeans too, but also somewhat semiticised.
And there are virtually no linguistic expeditions to the Upper Caucasus anymore, due to security concerns. A few Russians with contacts still do it, but virtually no Westerners since the State Dept can't protect you. Look at all the work on Svan in the 80s that came to an immediate halt.
Just another reason to resurrect the USSR.
Hi Maxime --
Thomas Wier and I have been e-mailing of late, and it seems that he has a Fulbright to study Svan and Mingrelian next year. How much he actually ventures outside of Tbilisi and interacts with those groups remains to be seen. He doesn't seem to be the very adventurous, hardy type to me, and having spent a few days in Dmanisi with the Azeris and Svans in the lower Caucasus myself, I know firstand that those mountain villages are no fun place to be in a post-Soviet winter, especially now that Russia will once again be inclined to charge the Georgians extortion-level prices for natural gas.
Tom also did the whole etymological breakdown of "jigar" from the Indo-Iranian "yekwar", which bears a little more resemblance to the the English, liver, than jigar does. He, too, had no idea about the vector by which the Georgians adopted the "loved-ones" connotation. However, I figure the vector is most likely similar to how the Arabic word "khushara" (offal or tripe) ended up in Georgian, which made it into both Tajik and Georgian as "khash" and "khashi", respectively. The interesting thing is that khash for Central Asians is any cartilage or blood sausage dish with strong Islamic connotations and is always eaten during the end of Ramadan and some other Muslim holidays, but for Georgians, it's just an ordinary tripe/bone cartilage soup eaten whenever.
Thus, I think most Georgians misinterpret me when I claim that they have adopted some word or some thing from another culture. The Georgians may adopt these foreign influences passively or with little recognition of that fact, but they still do so in a way that alters and recreates that prior influence to make the influence more Georgian to the point that it feels culturally innate to them. In that regard, I see "khashi" as being something regional or Islamic because I'm an outsider who has lived in countries in close proximity to Georgia, whereas Georgians simply perceive "khashi" as being something that is traditional Georgian cuisine with little connection to their surrounding groups. I think that makes Georgians provincial or uncultured in a certain way, but it's no more uncultured than an American not knowing the origins of such foods as tortillas or coffee.
I agree that the Georgians aren't semitic in the same sense that Arabs or Persians might be, but I think much of the rudimentary DNA tracing that is taking place right now is shattering a lot of the local and transnational stereotypes of ethnicity. One of the interesting discoveries, of course, which I'm sure you've heard, is that Arabs have almost as much genetically in common with western Europeans as they do with North Africans, so I tend to look at the Georgians as being somewhere along a ethnic and cultural continuum connecting North Africa to Europe, even if Georgians themselves like to claim that they predate both modern Europeans and Arabs (which I highly doubt, given that the modern Georgian most likely has very little genetically in common with the prehistoric Georgian, if you follow the Georgians nationalistic claim that the prehistoric skeletal remains that were dug up in Dmanisi a few years ago and claimed as the oldest remnants of a human being in continental Europe were in fact "Georgian"). There's also a discernible an Asian Turkic influence in this group from the migrations/invasions of Seljuks, Mongols, and Timurids, too, but those west-east migrations were, of course, much more recent than any of the south-north and north-south migrations, which would have been the ethnic basis of the majority of linguistically and ethnically distinct Caucasian groups.
Whether a Georgian is more like a Persian or Russian ethnically and culturally is a silly argument, I know, and plays into the whole outdated notion that identity politics matters in an age of increasing globalization and cultural amalgamation, but it's an argument I like to start with both linguists and Georgians for that matter, since I think both groups share the bias of looking at Georgian identity through the romantic prism of 19th century Russian authors like Pushkin, who viewed Georgians as some sort of exotic Europeans.
From my experience in that country, it seems to me that Georgians, as much as they may currently despise the Russians, have a much greater fear of being associated with anything Islamic or Middle Eastern than being accidentally conflated with Russians by the outside world (which I'm sure you know happens all the time in the US). You would not believe how many racist things I heard said about Turks or about Middle Easterners and Central Asians in general while I was in Georgia, and this was by seemingly highly educated Tbliselis. Then, in the same breath, the people I was talking to would start counting in Persian from one to ten as they were playing a game of backgammon, like they're completely oblivious to the Iranian/Semitic influence on their own culture or just didn't care to admit the obvious in a country that has become exceeding nationalistic in post-Soviet times.
I think this fear of being looked upon as something other than European also plays strongly in Saakashvili's and most Georgians' drive to become part of NATO and the EU. The grand irony, of course, is that this drive has made Russia isolate them militarily, economically and culturally, which in turn has forced the Georgians to turn to the Turks, Iranians, Azeris, and Kazakhs, much to their racist distaste, for much-needed capital, food, consumer goods, and energy resources. At this rate, I think it's only a matter of time before Georgians are forced to reconcile with the descendants of the their repeat invaders from the east and south, as they look past the de facto Cold War demarcations to renew centuries-old economic and cultural ties, much like the Armenians are already doing vis-a-vis Iran and Turkey.
Brian
Hi Brian,
Actually, the Georgian for brown is ""qavisperi", rather than "qavaperi". Interesting that the Russians name the color after cinnamon.
And a related question: do they drink Turkish coffee (or any other kind, besides Nescafe) in Uzbekistan, or only tea? Interesting that they don't drink Turkish coffee in Azerbaijan, while in Armenia it's ubiquitous (Armenian coffee, that is). An Ottoman thing rather than a Persian thing?
Tim B.
Tom had actually pointed that error out when the debate was first going around. I've just been too lazy to correct the mistake. The Uzbeks rarely drink coffee. They drink black tea in the Uzbek parts of the country, green tea in the Tajik parts of the country, and Nescafe everywhere else. There used to be Meskhetian Turks in Samarkand who opened a Turkish restaurant in the center of town, and I would get my Turkish coffee fix there, but the few remaining Turks left town for Russia due to deteriorating economic conditions on '05 or '06.
What do you think about the Kyrgyz shuttering the Manas airbase? I'm currently on contract for the Defense Logisitcs Agency helping them correct their incorrect accounting, so it's all very amusing reading the statements of the military attaches in Central Asia and the logisitics people back at Ft. Belvoir. I think they're still operating under the delusion that they can persuade Karimov to reopen negotiations on Khanabad. For now, it looks like all they'll get is access to rail lines emanating out of the ports in the Black and Baltic Seas and leading down to the Friendship Bridge along the original Soviet invasion route. Of course, when I was in Uzbekistan for most of December, there seemed to be some optimism among the local populace that Karimov could be game for rapproachment with Obama. The Iranians still haven't made too many inroads into Central Asia, unlike in Armenia and Georgia, so it's still Russia's game to call, though China and South Korea are fast making it a three-way race. Meanwhile, the Indians are too focused on their call centers, terrorism, and accounting crises to give a damn about what happens to the north, outside of Kashmir. I work with a bunch of Indian emigres in the DC area, and they almost invariably say "Tashkent what" when I explain where I went for the holidays, which is almost as alarming as Chinese students I met while at Ohio State who couldn't tell me where Uighurstan was on a map but they had no problem locating "Xingxiang".
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