Georgian Verbs: Screeves, Polypersonalism, and the Three Series

Verbs are where Georgian concentrates its difficulty — and its elegance. English spreads meaning across helper words ("would have been…"); Georgian compresses it into the verb itself, to a degree that surprises even speakers of other inflected languages. This guide maps the system: how verbs agree, why there are no "tenses" in the familiar sense, and what makes Georgian verbs genuinely unique.

Verbs agree with the subject — from the front

Unlike English ("I write", "he writes" — barely different), Georgian marks the person clearly on the verb. The first-person marker is a ვ- prefix on the stem:

• ვწერ (vtser) — "I write"
• ის წერს (is tser-s) — "he/she writes" (the -ს ending marks third person)

A small set of markers does the work: the ვ- prefix for "I" (and "we"), -ს for third-person singular, -თ for plural, and -ენ for third-person plural. So მე ვმუშაობ (I work) becomes ის მუშაობს (he/she works) when the person changes — and ჩვენ ვმუშაობთ (we work) carries both the prefix and the plural suffix.

There are no "tenses" — there are screeves

Georgian verbs don't line up into neat past/present/future columns. Instead, each verb has a set of related forms called a screeve (მწკრივი, mtsk'rivi), covering tense, aspect, and mood together. Linguists usually count eleven screeves in total; the course teaches them one at a time rather than dumping the table on you.

Two things make screeves tricky. First, verbs often change their stem between screeves: ნახვა ("to see") uses ხედავ- in the present (ვხედავ, "I see") but ნახ- in the aorist (ვნახე, "I saw"). Second, the forms don't always follow tidy rules — which is exactly why a structured course beats random exposure.

The three series

To keep the screeves organized, Georgian stacks them into three big series, each with its own endings — and its own case patterns:

• Series I — the present system. Present, imperfect, and future forms. The subject stays in the nominative. This is the whole first two phases of the course.
• Series II — the aorist system. The simple completed past ("I wrote") plus the optative ("may I write"). New endings, a mandatory preverb, and — the famous twist — the subject of a transitive verb switches to the ergative case. This is the "ergative wall".
• Series III — the perfect system. Completed actions whose result matters now ("I have written") and the pluperfect ("I had written"). Built from a past participle plus the verb "to be" (ვწერია, "I have written"). Here the transitive subject takes the dative, not the ergative.

Each series is a different "mood" of the language, and the course builds them in exactly that order.

Polypersonal verbs: the sentence inside the word

Georgian's most famous feature is the polypersonal verb: one verb can encode the subject and the direct object and sometimes the indirect object. English "gave" doesn't tell you who gave what to whom; a Georgian verb can pack "she gave it to me" into a single word.

Take მაჩუქა ("she gave [it] to me as a gift") from the course's Phase 4:

• მ- — "to me" (1st-person object marker)
• ა- — "she" (3rd-person subject in the aorist)
• -ჩუქ- — the root "to give as a gift"
• -ა — the aorist ending

Or გვხედავთ — "we see him/her": გვ- (we) + ხედავ (see) + -თ (plural). Three grammatical ideas, one word. This is remarkable — and it's why you can't translate Georgian sentence-by-sentence. You learn to think inside the verb, and the course dedicates all of Phase 4 to it.

"Backwards" verbs: to have, to be hungry

Some of Georgian's most common verbs are indirect: the logical subject is marked on the verb like an object, and the grammatical subject is the thing involved. The classic example is the verb "to have":

• მაქვს (makvs) — literally "to me it is" = "I have". The owner is marked with მ- ("to me"); the thing owned stays in the nominative: მე მაქვს სახლი — "I have a house."
• Change the owner and the prefix changes: გაქვს ("you have"), აქვს ("he/she has"), აქვთ ("they have").

The same pattern drives everyday verbs like მშია ("I am hungry" — "hunger is to me") and მიყვარს ("I love", literally "is dear to me"). They look backwards for about a week, then they're just normal.

Verb classes at a glance

For completeness: the course groups verbs into four classes by their patterns — Class 1 (transitive workhorses like წერა "write" and მუშაობა "work", the -ებს/-ობს pattern), Class 2 (intransitive and indirect verbs like სიარული "walk" and მეშინია "I am afraid"), Class 3 (irregular essentials: ყოფნა "be", ქონა "have", ჭამა "eat"), and Class 4 (mediopassive and motion verbs like მოსვლა "come", whose third-person plural ends in -იან: მოდიან "they come"). You don't need the taxonomy to speak — but recognizing the class explains why one verb "should" look like another.

The honest summary: Georgian verbs are the largest single project in the language, and also the most rewarding one. The pieces — person markers, screeves, series, polypersonalism — are each teachable on their own, and the course sequences them so the hard parts arrive one at a time.

Next: the case system and the ergative flip is the grammar that verbs plug into. For the wider picture, start with the beginner's grammar overview, and for the honest time commitment, see how long it takes.