Tsereteli, Konstantin Constantine 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.
- 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)
- 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.