Happy Monday {{first_name}}! 👋
I hope your week is off to a good start.
Before we get into this email, quick question: have you ever finished a packet of something without deciding to?
Not a decision. Not a binge. You put your hand in, you had a thought about something else, and then the packet was empty and slightly disappointing.
English makes you confess to that. Georgian doesn't.
Let's get into it!
Language: Georgian: შემომეჭამა / shemomechama (sheh-moh-meh-CHA-ma)
Meaning: I accidentally ate the whole thing.
Not "I ate it." Not "I ate too much." The accident is built into the verb.
In English, we reach for an excuse:
"I didn't mean to eat all of it." "It just sort of happened."
Georgian puts the not-meaning-to inside the word itself: shemomechama.
Why it's fascinating:
This isn't a cute idiom. It's grammar.
Georgian verbs can be marked for what linguists call involuntary or unintentional action, a construction where the thing that happened is grammatically not your fault. The eater stops being the subject doing the eating and becomes something closer to the person it happened to.
English has one fossilised scrap of this, and we barely notice it: the vase broke, rather than I broke the vase. Georgian can do that on purpose, productively, to almost anything.
So the word doesn't mean "I greedily ate it." It means something much more forgiving, and much funnier: the eating occurred, and I was present.
Example:
Someone asks where the cake went.
You say: shemomechama. The matter is closed.
This is the kind of thing that makes learning a language feel impossible from a textbook. A whole attitude folded into one verb ending, where the closest English gets is a shrug.
It's also exactly what I built LLH Tutor for. It explains English phrases, idioms and emotional nuance in terms of your native language, so the meaning actually lands instead of arriving as a rough translation.
Svan: Georgian's Older Cousin, High in the Caucasus
Georgian is not alone. It belongs to a small family, Kartvelian, with no proven relatives anywhere else on Earth, and one of its members is in real trouble.
Svan is spoken in Svaneti, a region high in the Caucasus mountains in north-west Georgia. It split from the rest of the family a very long time ago, long enough that a Georgian speaker cannot understand it. Same family, no mutual intelligibility.
It has kept things the others lost. Svan holds onto vowel distinctions and archaic forms that dropped out of Georgian centuries ago, which makes it disproportionately valuable for working out what the ancestor language sounded like.
A language can be thousands of years old, structurally irreplaceable, and still be one generation from silence — not because anyone attacked it, but because it was never the language you needed for anything official.
Fun fact: The English word "scapegoat" is a mistranslation that stuck.
When William Tyndale was translating Leviticus in 1530, he hit a Hebrew word, azazel, that nobody could agree on. He read it as ez ozel, "the goat that departs", and coined "scapegoat" to cover it.
Most scholars now think Azazel was a proper name, probably a demon. So an entire English concept, the innocent party who carries everyone else's blame, exists because a translator in the sixteenth century made a reasonable guess and it was too useful to correct.
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