Georgian Grammar - Adjectives

Adjectives

Properly speaking, Georgian does not distinguish nouns from adjectives; rather, it distinguishes modifiers from modified by relative position in the nominal clause. As a result of this, things that might sound like adjectives can have substantive force in Georgian: one could say mindoda lurji ts'igni ("I would like the blue book") or just mindoda lurji ("I would like the blue one"). The declension of these adjective-like modifiers is different from that of nouns, but like that of nouns, it depends on whether the root of the adjective ends with a consonant or a vowel: a vowel-final-stem adjective is identical in all cases, while a consonant-final-stem adjective changes from case to case. (Put another way, one might say that vowel-final-stem adjectives do not actually decline for case.) The following table presents declensions of the adjectives did- ("big") and ch'aghara- ("grey") with the noun datv- ("bear").