Georgian Alphabet

## 1 2 3 1. : AN * - a 2. : BAN - b 3. : GAN - g 4. : DON - d 5. : EN * - e 6. : VIN - v 7. : ZEN - z 8. : TAN - t 9. : IN * - i 10. : KAN - k' 11. : LAS - l 12. : MAN - m 13. : NAR - n 14. : ON * - o 15. : PAR - p' 16. : ZHAR - zh 17. : RAE - r ## 1 2 3 18. : SAN - s 19. : TAR - t' 20. : UN * - u 21. : PAR - p 22. : KAR - k 23. : GHAN - gh 24. : Q'AR - q' 25. : SHIN - sh 26. : CHIN - ch 27. : TSAN - ts 28. : DZIL - dz 29. : TS'IL - ts' 30. : CH'AR - ch' 31. : KHAN - kh 32. : JAN - j 33. : HAE - h

1 - Georgian Letters;    2 - Name;   3 - Transliteration;
* - Vowels

The contemporary Georgian script is known as mkhedruli ('military') in contrast to the earlier khutsuri ('ecclesiastical') script. The oldest surviving examples of mkhedruli date from the 11-12th centuries, and it may well be that the script was a development of a cursive form of khutsuri.
Modern Georgian makes use of 33 letters. These are given above, together with the transliteration system (Apridonidze-Chkhaidze, Institute of Linguistics. Georgian Academy of Sciences). This scheme is not ideal in that it uses several digraphs, but it does have the merits of avoiding diacritics (with the exception of the apostrophe), and of being suited to the English-speaking reader. There is no ambiguity, as the digraph letter pairs do not occur as combinations of two individual letters. Georgian does not distinguish between upper and lower case letters. For emphasis, letters which are normally printed with ascenders and descenders, or both, are all printed as if to fit between two parallel horizontal lines. Some four letters have variant forms which are widely encountered in handwriting. Georgian handwriting can often be a little difficult to read, not least because of the number of ligatures used.