Brunvata sist’emis sc’avlebisatvis sajaro sk’olashi /ბრუნვათა სისტემის სწავლებისათვის საჯარო სკოლაში [For Teaching the Case System in the Public School]

Abstract

In parallel with the developing modern technologies, it becomes increasingly important to produce textbooks that are based on logical approaches. Our goal is to develop such ”standardized rules of the declension of nominals that will facilitate both analysis and synthesis of word forms of nominals in modern Georgian ”. The article deals with the issue of teaching the case system of Georgian by taking into consideration the 5th- and 7th-grade textbooks written by different authors using different approaches. In the available textbooks, Georgian cases are taught separately from the so-called postpositional forms of cases; this prevents the pupils from having a systemic understanding of the material. The origin of the problem should be sought in the definition of the category of case and the confusion of diachronic and synchronic aspects in textbooks: the history of the development of the grammatical phenomenon is one thing, the current state of it is another. The article deals with the classification of the case system in Georgian on the synchronic level based on logical rules – the approach is a particular novelty in terms of the methodology of teaching the case system of the Georgian language. The basic postulates are as follows: 1. The term “case” is defined as the morphological category of nominals, within the scope of which the formative suffix adds the grammatical function to a wordform (leaving the lexical meaning unchanged); 2. The case is a combination of a noun stem and a case marker; 3. The case marker may be simple (-ს [-s], -ის [-is], -ით[-it], ად[-ad], etc.) or complex//compound (-სში [-sši] “in”, -ისგან [-isgan] “from (anim.)”, -იდან [-idan] / -დან [-dan] from (inanimate), -ამდე [-amde] / -მდე [-mde] “up to”, etc.). According to the classification on the synchronic level, three logically differentiated types of cases are identified in the Georgian language: 1. a simple case: nominal stem + simple case marker (დედა-ს [deda-s] “mother/to mother”, ქვეყნ-ად [kveqnad] “on the earth”); 2. a complex (compound) case: nominal stem + complex (compound) case marker (ლომ-ივით [lomi-vit] “like a lion”, ხე-სთან [xe-stan] “at the tree”); a complex case marker is constructed by merging a simple case marker with a postposition and expresses additional grammatical or semantic nuances; 3. a case with a postposition: nominal stem + simple case marker + separate auxiliary word //postposition (კაც-ის მიერ / გამო [kac-is mier/gamo “by / because of a man”). The proposed approach will simplify the process of learning and understanding the paradigm of the noun in a systemic way, on the one hand, and will assist in developing the software for machine translation, on the other hand. საკვანძო სიტყვები: ქართული ენა, ბრუნვათა სისტემა, რთული და მარტივი ბრუნვები, თანდებულიანი ბრუნვები. Keywords: Georgian language, case system, simple and complex cases, cases with postpositions.