What historical factors affected Georgian phonology?
Throughout its history Georgian has had several factors which have influenced its phonology. Primarily its geographic location on the crossroads between Europe and Asia certainly had a large impact. It was influenced by the ancient Indo-European Speaking peoples of Asia Minor, the more recent Slavs and Mongols to the North, The Turkic speaking peoples to the west and east, the Armenians, and Iranians to the South. Although many Georgian sounds seem distinctly “Georgian” there is striking evidence that there was borrowing from other phonological systems of surrounding languages. The First example is the presence of a voiced- semi-voiced- aspirated system of consonants (Aronson, 29). In other words, for any place of articulation, there are three phonemes capable of being produced (i.e. p-p=-b) . In English there are only the phonemes /p/ vs. /b/. However, other Indo-European languages such as Armenian have the three levels of consonantal voicing as opposed to only two. Whether Georgian b
