ივანე ჯავახიშვილი ქართველთა ეთნოგენეზის შესახებ და ლინგვისტური კავკასიოლოგია

Abstract

Ivane Javakhishvili initiated the study of Georgian-Kartvelian languages in relation with highland Caucasian languages. He considered that research in that direction and the comprehensive study of the data of Caucasian languages would become a breakthrough for those languages and would enable scholarship to solve quite significant problems. The problem in question was associated with the genesis of the Georgian language and of the Georgian people. In order to solve the problem, Javakhishvili regarded it essential to study the original nature of the Georgian and highland Caucasian languages. In his seminal study (“The Original Nature and Relation of the Georgian and Caucasian Languages.” Tbilisi, 1937), he stated that those languages were genetically related. He wrote: ,,As far as it has been established that the socalled Caucasian languages have been spoken by the tribes, related to our ancestors, every educated Georgian should know about the languages and history of these tribes in the same way as their own language and history.” He was sure that the questions of the ethnogenesis could be solved by means of the profound examination of linguistic data. Therefore, he called future scholars should not be afraid of difficulties and should study the issue essentially. Following Javakhishvili’s heritage, the Georgian school of Caucasian Studies thoroughly studied key issues of Ibero-Caucasian linguistics in the 20th c. In the early 20th c. Georgian scholars carried out significant research by means of applying scientific methods and solved the problem of the ethnogenesis of Georgians (M. Chukhua, M. Kurdiani). In spite of this, the crisis, that started in the 20th c., caused by the defamation of comparative studies, is still in effect even after the two fundamental studies were published. The above mentioned discreditation was not due to the drawbacks of comparative studies. The comparativist method is universal in connection to any language family. The purposeful defamation of comparative studies yielded in the integration of different language families into phylums (Noetic, Nostratic, Boretic, Dene-Caucasian, etc). Based on the said approach, South and North Caucasian languages were distributed to different genealogic trees. The assumption, that the method was not trustworthy, caused the emergence of new hypotheses (allogenetic theory) and, later, those investigations were declared objective truths and were referred to as undisputable theories. The paper addresses the “Dark Ages,” having existed in comparative studies, its periods and the factors, having caused the creation of quasi-scientific opuses. It is an attempt to solve the problem in point.