The Semantics of the Word "Koki" in Georgian

Abstract

Dialectal speech continues to preserve lexical units originating from Old Georgian that have undergone varying degrees of formal and semantic change over the centuries. In this regard, particularly valuable material is largely retained in figurative expressions. Scholars of Georgian dialectology also recognize that, since the latter half of the twentieth century, the linguistic areas of the principal dialects have been changing rapidly. Due to ongoing socio-economic processes and other factors affecting public life, dialectal lexemes are gradually disappearing, some being lost entirely, while others survive only as part of the historical record of dialectology. Unfortunately, this process is even more pronounced in settlements with small linguistic communities, especially in villages where dialect mixing occurs as a result of internal migration of the local population and the demographic or linguistic expansion of speakers of other dialects.
Considering that this phenomenon (linguistic tendency) has become a natural process in the Georgian linguistic landscape of the twenty-first century, as dialectal speech is no longer able to survive in villages almost entirely depopulated of their local inhabitants, the revival of even a single lexical unit becomes particularly valuable and necessary. The present article is intended precisely to serve this purpose.
In Old Georgian, the word koki was an independent lexeme referring to a thorn-covered tree branch "prepared for striking others." This meaning remained in use until approximately the eighteenth century. Presumably around this time (primarily in the southwestern dialects of Georgian), the word kök of Turkish origin, phonetically similar to Georgian koki, entered the language with meanings such as “root,” “origin,” “lineage,” or “descent,” and related concepts. Consequently, this new semantic value is already attested in eighteenth-century Georgian sources (see Saba: “gvarsavitaa”, D. Guramishvili, among others). From the nineteenth century onward, when the Georgian language already possessed several synonymous words such as jishi ‘breed,’ gvari ‘family name,’ pesvi ‘root,’ dziri ‘root,’ and modgma ‘lineage,’ the Turkish-derived koki, survived in its original meaning only in curse formulas, appearing in various verbal and nominal forms.