The Talking Buryat Phrasebook

The Talking Phrasebook Series presents useful phrases and words in side-by-side translation and with audio files specifically geared to help students work on listening skills and pronunciation. Each entry below, divided by category, features an English word or phrase in the left column and its Georgian translation in the right. The Georgian is presented in the Georgian alphabet on top and in English transliteration below that.

In the center column for each row is a play button. The recorded file will feature first English, then the Georgian in three versions: one slow, one with each syllable broken out, and a last version that will be spoken as it might be overheard in a conversation between native speakers.

Table of Contents
1. Survival Basics
2. Introductions
3. Directions
4. Shopping
5. Counting

Interesting Facts about Buryat

1. There is no grammatical gender in Buryat, no seperate adjectives for “he,” “she,” and “it,” and no seperate adjectives for “male” and “female” (although the noun forms of “man” and “woman” are sometimes compounded to words to serve as an equivelent to the adjectival forms).
2. Buryat places the object before the verb. If English used this same rule, you would need to say, for example, “I Buryat learn.”
3. Buryat places its prepositions after the words they modify (in which case, the word type is actually known as a postpostion. If English used this same rule, you would need to say, for example, “I live America in.”
4. Buryat speakers live in pockets of population in Russia, Mongolia, and China. There are many dialects which have formed based, in part, on the influences that the larger national languages have had on the local population. Those dialects spoken in Russia are split by Lake Baikal, with those speakers on the west side of the lake showing more Russian influence and those to the east showing less.
5. Buryat is an official language of the Republic of Buryatia and enjoys protected status there. Buryatia is located on eastern shore of Lake Baikal and is part of The Russian Federation.
6. Buryat has seven noun cases: nominative, genitive, dative-locative, accusative, instrumental, comitative, and ablative. Ablative is most common in Turkic and Turkic-influenced languages and most commonly denotes movement away from something else.
7. There are an estimated half million ethnic Buryats. It is also estimated that bit less than sixty percent of them speak Buryat. The UN has classified Buryat as an endagered language.

Survival Basics for Buryat back to top

Introductions in Buryat  back to top

Asking Directions  back to top

Shopping  back to top

Counting   back to top

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