ABSTRACT
Georgia was converted to Christianity in the middle of the fourth century; and a need to make the Gospels accessible to the Georgians in their own language must have fostered the creation of a Georgian alphabet, which followed early in the fifth century. According to tradition, St Mesrop Mashtotz, the creator of the Armenian script, was also, at least in part, responsible for the Georgian alphabet. Like the Armenian, the Georgian alphabet is clearly based on a Greek model, for example in the order of the letters. But the Georgian phonological inventory is very different from the Greek; and this first classification and notation of Caucasian phonemes – a classification which remains valid today – must rank as a linguistic achievement of the first order.
