Assuming it's not a forgery, the tablet is unusual in that it appears to be made from locally sourced basalt, but no burials or ancient settlements are known in the area, except for a historic road that was built much later. However, the researchers speculate about a potential ancient settlement in the vicinity of what is now an artificial lake:
>Drone research (Fig. 6) revealed that the area of approximately 4 km2 is divided into geometrical shapes contoured by means of white stones brought from somewhere else. Special, in-depth studies showed entire sets of regular circles that could be burial mounds; the rectangular, semicircular and combined geometric figures could be the remains of houses, defense structures and places of worship.
Something very cool about the Georgian language is that its family, the Kartvelian family, has no known relation to any other language family. It's one of the world's primary language families. Its origin, including the alphabet, is very mysterious.
The alphabet is so cool, strong resemblance to Tolkien's elvish. Especially when you find a ruined castle or monastery in the mountains with that script on the gate.
Though I recall on my first trip there being told that the origin of the Georgian script was the developer of the Armenian script tossing some spaghetti on the wall.
Your sentence makes it sound like Yeniseian languages are language isolates, but what is absolutely astounding is that Yeniseian languages seem to form a family with the Na-Dene languages of North America. Two language families separated by the Bering strait over 15000 years ago!
It can imply isolation, but not necessarily. It is also possible that there are some precursor languages, of which no evidence could be found (yet). Another good example are the Koreanic languages of which modern Korean is a member.
The Ket language of central Siberia has long been believed to be isolate, but was later classified as a member of the Dene–Yeniseian language family (or at least proposed, afaik this research is still ongoing).
That's fair, but also just as interesting. What are the chances that language is older than we thought? And if decent chances, how much older? Were early hominids capable of speaking?
There could also be a distant relationship with the Brahmi script / family [1]
Some characters have similarities. The Brahmi 𑀕 may be related to the <Gimel> 𐤂
character in the tablet. Other characters like the "tha" (the O with a dot in the middle), the (, the O, the ) and some others also appear to have common traits.
There almost certainly is a distant relationship. Almost all writing systems in Eurasia are derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphics through the Phoenician script, which gave us the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Hebrew, Arabic, and the Brahmi script, among others. The only system in use today in the whole world which isn't derived from Phonecian is Chinese and even there its derivatives like Japanese kana and Korean hangul were influenced by knowledge of alphabetic writing via India.
To find something unrelated would be monumental and would suggest another culture independently invented writing, something known to have happened only a few times (Egypt, China, Mesopotamia, Mayans, maybe the Indus Valley civilization, plus a handful of other disputed instances).
> An initial comparative analysis conducted with over 20 languages shows that the characters, which could belong to an aboriginal Caucasian population, beside proto-Georgian and Albanian writing signs, bear some similarities with Semitic, Brahmani, and North Iberian characters.
Odd to see so many are confused about the country of Georgia. I thought it is known for having a unique language, and thus the first place of the two Georgias where one would expect a mysterious tablet with an unknown language to be found.
Ever concider it might be runic. Many of those symbols look runic. I would translate the first two symbols to say fortunate lake the last looks like the runic symbol for protection.
Thanks ben stiles
Ever concider it might be runic. Many of those symbols look runic. I would translate the first two symbols to say fortunate lake the last looks like the runic symbol for protection.
Thanks ben stiles
> Archaeologists have speculated that the writing may have recorded military spoils, construction projects, or offerings to deities, though definitive interpretations remain elusive.
So they know jack shit. Just as likely to be for accounting purposes, like a large number of Sumerian tablets.
Too bad. They've had many centuries to unite their peninsula into a single country, and didn't do it, so they don't deserve any special consideration for the name "Iberia".
“The Iberian Union is a historiographical term used to describe the personal union of the Kingdom of Portugal with the Monarchy of Spain, which in turn was itself the dynastic union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon, and of their respective colonial empires, that existed between 1580 and 1640 and brought the entire Iberian Peninsula except Andorra, as well as Portuguese and Spanish overseas possessions, under the Spanish Habsburg monarchs Philip II, Philip III, and Philip IV. The union began after the Portuguese succession crisis of 1580 and the ensuing War of the Portuguese Succession, and lasted until the Portuguese Restoration War, during which the House of Braganza was established as Portugal's new ruling dynasty with the acclamation of John IV as the new king of Portugal.”
Perhaps these folks at the UN: https://unterm.un.org/unterm2/en/ who maintain a list of names for countries, with both long form and short form in 6 different languages.
I'm curious how people pronounce this when they've never heard it. Do people assume the 'e' is silent as in "eye". For anyone curious it's basically "Turkey-yeah" & the "yeah" is short.
Sankara was pretty big on breaking with western influences and going back to local culture. The Upper Voltaic Ambassador title was an unfortunate victim of that
Sorry but where is the list? I needed one in 2021 and ended up building my own out of Wikipedia and common sense but if the UN has one I'd rather use it.
We don't need to wait around, but people are going to treat you differently if you start casually saying "my friend visited Deutschland on holiday." Even Germans will probably think you're doing some sort of bit.
Or worse, start saying just the country name with a German accent, the way that the pretentious news readers like to pronounce Spanish names with a Spanish accent. But only Spanish names. Not other countries.
Or perhaps something like Kartvelia in English since, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_(country)#Names_of_Geo...:
"The Georgian circumfix sa-X-o is a standard geographic construction designating 'the area where X dwell', where X is an ethnonym."
The family of languages that includes Georgian is the Kartvelian family. So there’s already some precedent for Kartvelia (noun)/Kartvelian (adjective) in English.
I don't think my keyboard handles the first very well (we did switch from spelling the city of "Peking" to "Beijing" though), but for the latter, sure.
In some cases name changes are political so I could see there being resistance to going along, if the politics doesn't align.
It's less confusing if you understand its name in Farsi, which is Gorgistan. The regional neighbors of it all have unique names for it that don't overlap with the US state.
What a colossal waste of money and effort. The person or people who wasted their money on this project should have known better than to erect such a thing in the deep South.
From the Wikipedia article: "Some locals referred to its construction as 'the devil's work'. A local minister warned that "occult groups" would visit the site and that a sacrifice was imminent." Even worse: "Kandiss Taylor, a candidate in the 2022 Georgia Republican gubernatorial primary, called the Guidestones "Satanic" in a campaign ad"
With local culture this backwards, you can't expect something like this to last for long.
As an ESL speaker, my first impression was "a tablet computer displaying unknown language found in Georgia, US". Feels like some extraterrestrial technology.
I first learned that Georgia was a country when Russia invaded 16 years ago. I found the headline very confusing and shocking at the time. I took it as a lesson and haven't been confused by headlines about Georgia since.
I don’t think anyone but US people got confused by those headlines. Makes sense though. When there are two places with identical names, you hear more often about the one closest to you, so that’d be your first assumption.
Maybe they taught it in grade school, I don't know. I avoided learning much of what was taught in grade/middle/high school. I didn't learn the US states and their capitals either.
Of course if I had paid attention I probably would have just learned "USSR" at the time. But maybe that makes it even less forgivable since it was current events.
Assuming it's not a forgery, the tablet is unusual in that it appears to be made from locally sourced basalt, but no burials or ancient settlements are known in the area, except for a historic road that was built much later. However, the researchers speculate about a potential ancient settlement in the vicinity of what is now an artificial lake:
>Drone research (Fig. 6) revealed that the area of approximately 4 km2 is divided into geometrical shapes contoured by means of white stones brought from somewhere else. Special, in-depth studies showed entire sets of regular circles that could be burial mounds; the rectangular, semicircular and combined geometric figures could be the remains of houses, defense structures and places of worship.