Tsereteli, KonstantinConstantine Tsereteli (1921–2004)

Scholar of comparative Semitics,Aramaic dialectology, and Neo-Aramaic; professor at the State University of Tbilisi, Georgia. As a student Tsereteli devoted himself to Caucasian and Eastern languages, including Old Persian, Classical Armenian, Abkhaz, and Avar, adding Hebrew and Aramaic when he was a graduate student. He subsequently became interested in the Modern Eastern-Aramaic dialects spoken by the many Assyrians living in Georgia. His original work on these dialects resulted in a great number of publications written in Georgian and/or Russian. Some of them were subsequently translated into western languages. He also published a description of Classical Syriac (1979, in Russian) and a short historical grammar of Aramaic, covering nearly three millennia of the history of the Aramaic languages (1982, in Georgian and Russian). A Festschrift was presented to him in 1993.

Select publications by Tsereteli

• The Modern Assyrian language (1964, in Russian). (IT 1970, GT 1978, and ET 1978)
• Grammar of the Modern Assyrian language (1968). (in Georgian)
• The Syriac language (1979). (in Russian)

Secondary Sources

• R.  Contini, F. A.  Pennacchietti, and M.  Tosco (ed.),Semitica. Serta philologica Constantino Tsereteli dicata (1993). (IX–XIII: biography by the editors; XV–XXIV: bibliography up to 1990)
• Th. V.  Gamkrelidze and G.  Chikovani, ‘Konstantin Tsereteli (1921–2004)’,OC 89 (2005), 221–4.

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