A brief note on Georgia's capital

[Kim Braithwaite]

Lately I've noticed that in the dateline of many newspaper accounts of events in Georgia, and in other kinds of printed material as well, the capital city of that republic is spelled TBLISI. While it's true that the Georgian language is famous for bunching consonants together at the start of words, and that includes many placenames (cf Tkvarcheli, Mtskheta etc), in this case the spelling is wrong. No Georgian word starts with TBL-.

Possibly it has been influenced by the common pronunciation tuh-BLEE-see that seems to be outsiders' most comfortable way to cope with it. Transliterated straight from the Georgian the spelling is TBILISI (and the native pronunciation is TBEE-lee-see but that's of no consequence; I'm not one to insist that outsiders copy native sounds exactly). For that matter, the ancient town of Tbilisi (earlier Georgian spelling Tpilisi) was for centuries known to the outside world and to Russians as Tiflis, which I believe derives from an old Arabic and/or Persian modification of the native name.

Mr Kim Braithwaite, Translator

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