Tbilisi: As Georgia celebrated Georgian Language Day, here is an interesting account of the famous writer, Nodar Dumbadze, about the Georgian Language and the value of the Mother tongue.
As Nodar Dumbadze quotes- “Mother tongue, as it is called mother, does not need to be remembered anymore if you are a man and not an animal – the tongue is your mother, and you should always remember, you should immortalize it, as much as you can and with what you can. One of the most precious books in my family – a relic was kept.
This book became the mother tongue of Gogebashvili, the mother tongue that my mother was studying and which I would read in my childhood before going to school. Not because Mother Tongue was a poverty in our family; no, it was passed down from generation to generation like a blessed cradle, torn down and re-cadded a thousand times, that it would forcefully require the utmost care and virtue.
I took this mother tongue with me when I travelled to Turkey with a group of Georgian writers in 1968. In Bursa, a black-eyed boy approached me with a slightly pointed nose, as thin as a nose, he looked like a Gurian boy who grew up with a cold Mchadi, and I’m not lying.
– I’m a Gurji! – He told me the translator was helping us in the conversation.
– Why don’t you know Georgian? – I made him feel better.
– neney is dead on me ! – He was right to himself.
He said these two Georgian words to me so that I wanted to cry.
I took her to the hotel and gave her our family relic Motherena as a gift.
– It’s yours, take it, but learn it, I asked for it.
I nodded, smiled and took it. Took it and left me feeling like I gave it to my mom and brought her back to her dead mom.
Thank God, I’m not thanking, I just remembered. I had such a good mother; she was enough to be a mother for all the Turkish Georgians. And is it because no one else had a better mother than my mother? No, because he knew the value of the Georgian Language.
