„საყველპურო“ – ენის ცოდნის საზომი XIX-XXI საუკუნეების ქართულ დისკურსში

Abstract

According to the Explanatory Dictionary of the Georgian Language (1960: 879-880), the lexeme “saveluro” belongs to the colloquial style of language and its figurative meaning is “everyday”, “survival”. The extralinguistic basis for the transfer of meaning does not, at first glance, require any special research. The concept of creating a composite derivative to express everyday, basic, “saveluro”(the word in Georgian is composed of two words: “veli” – “cheese” and “uri” “bread”)– automatically implies that cheese and bread must have been the daily food of Georgians at the time of the coinage of the mentioned lexeme. Cheese and bread appeared in our diet centuries before the lexeme “saveluro” entered our speech, which, along with other artefacts, is evidenced by the ancient written monuments of the Georgian language. In the same monuments, as well as in later folklore specimens or new literary texts cheese and bread are paired, and eaten together. The combination of these two products formed the basis of the expressions in Georgian discourse that figuratively assess whether a woman and a man suit each other, such as “they suit each other like cheese and bread”. The importance of bread and cheese in our food culture is also indicated by the fact that in Georgian at different times “uri” (“bread”) and “vel-uri” (“cheesebread”) were used as general terms for staple food. Cheese and bread are often found in Georgian folk tales and works of art to denote scanty breakfast or dinner. You can still hear the Georgian folk proverb from the host: “Cheese and Bread – Kind Heart” as an apology because of the “not-so-rich table”. It was this external factor that caused the adjective “saveluro” to develop the following meanings: ‘the least’, ‘small’, ‘simple’, ‘easy’, ‘elementary’, which are presented in the same order in Tedo Sakhokia’s “Figurative Dictionary” (1979: 558). Observations on the Georgian discourse of the 19th-21st centuries have revealed that in the vast majority of cases, “saveluro” is the definition of “knowledge” and this knowledge, in turn, largely implies the knowledge of the language. Relatively small but interesting are the contexts in which it addresses the native language. Examples of this type can be divided into two groups. In one case, speaking “saveluro Georgian” means forgetting one’s mother tongue, which is caused by a Georgian living abroad for a long time or living in their own country, but being in a foreign language environment: “The environment turned me into a Russian twice, it made me forget Georgian so much that I barely understood “saveluro Georgian” (Javakhishvili, 1959: 361). In the second case, “saveluro Georgian” is used to denote a low level of speech culture (from the radio report: “How long should we listen to the journalists’ saveluro Georgian?!”). The cases in which “saveluro” is used with a word denoting a particular foreign language far exceed the contexts mentioned above, for example,saveluro Russian / English / German / French / Greek, etc.The following words by Iakob Gogebashvili make the semantic difference that the adjective “saveluro” expresses when paired with a word denoting a foreign language more visible: “Bismarck, when an ambassador in Petersburg, tried to learn Russian, he even hired a tutor; But his Russian could not go beyond saveluro”; “As for the Russian language, these schools will only teach a savelurolanguage [to Georgian children] and they will only be able to understand simple statements in Russian so that they can make the peasants understand” (Gogebashvili, 1895: 29). “Saveluro”, which is considered as a unit of colloquial speech in dictionaries, is often found in the 21st-century media language or fiction, and the unit derived from food (based on gluttonyms) has been used for more than 150 years and reveals the same meaning in Georgian discourse as the “elementary level of language proficiency” in the didactics of modern languages.