EDIT Georgian is an alphabet used to write the four Kartvelian (South Caucasian) languages. It is written from left to right. Printed characters are not connected, but they can be in handwriting. The modern alphabet (Mkhedruli) consists of 33 letters that are all lower case. Sometimes capitals of the older Asomtavruli-alphabet are used for titels or headlines. The Georgian script has no separate glyphs for numbers, instead each letter also has a numerical value in addition to the phonological one.

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EDIT History The Georgian script had three distinct stages of development. The first Georgian alphabet was the Asomtavruli-alphabet (or Mrglovani / Mrgvlovani, meaning »round«). It consisted only of capitals (Asomtavruli actually means »capital«) and its letters were all the same height and written between two lines. It was probably created from the Greel alphabet since it letters follow the same order as the Greek letters do.

The Asomtavruli was used until the 9th century, when it developed into the Nuskha-Khucuri, a square alphabet that was mostly used in the 10th-11th century. It was written between four lines that correspond to groups of characters in four different sizes. The Nuskha-Khucuri was an ecclesiastical script, meant for use by priests (Nuskha means »writing«, Khucuri means »for ecclesiastic«). A mixture of Asomtavruli (for the capitals) and Nuskha-Khucuri called Khucesi script (»priest-script«) is still in use in the Georgian Orthodox Church today.

From this script the current, modern, script called Mkhedruli (»for men of the world«) evolved around the 13th century. The term Mkhedruli stems from the word Mkhedari, »men of horses«, meaning warrior.

The number of letters in the Georgian script changed over time from 37 to 33 today. In the 18th century for example the letter for the »w«-sound was added, later some letters that represented sounds that had disappeared from the language were removed.

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EDIT Oldest document The oldest documents are inscriptions in two churches, written in the Mrglovani (Asomtavruli) alphabet. One is an inscription in a church in Palestine from 430 AD (C\'ereteli 1960), the other stems from 490 AD and can be found in Georgia in the Bolnisi Sioni church, near Tbilisi (Sardzhveladze 1997; Danelia & Sardzhveladze 1997). The first printed texts were printed using Mkhedruli-Alphabet in 1669, the alphabet remained almost unchanged since then.

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EDIT Languages The Georgian script is used to write the four Kartvelian (South Caucasian) languages. They are Georgian (spoken by about 4.1 million people), Mingrelian, Laz and Svan. In this Unicode Block are two characters that are specifically for writing in Mingrelian and Svan: U+10F7 Georgian Letter Yn and U+10F8 Georgian Letter Elifi.

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