Screeve

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A screeve is a term of grammatical description in traditional Georgian grammars that roughly corresponds to TAM (tense-aspect-mood) marking in the Western grammatical tradition. It derives from the Georgian word mts'k'rivi (მწკრივი), which means "row". Formally, it refers to a set of six verb forms inflected for person and number forming a single paradigm. For example, the aorist screeve for most verbal forms consists at least of a preverb (და da-), a root (წერ c'er, "write"), and a screeve ending (ე -e, ა -a, ეს -es), and in the first and second persons a plural suffix (თ -t):

	Singular	Plural
First person	დავწერე davc'ere "I wrote it"	დავწერეთ davc'eret "We wrote it"
Second Person	დაწერე dac'ere "You wrote it"	დაწერეთ dac'eret "You(pl.) wrote it"
Third Person	დაწერა dac'era "He wrote it"	დაწერეს dac'eres "They wrote it"

Given the presence of similar terms in Western grammars, it is important to understand how screeves differ from them. In many Western languages, endings encode all of tense, aspect and mood, but in Georgian, the screeve endings may or may not include one of these categories. For example, the perfect series screeves have modal and evidential properties that are completely absent in the aorist and present/future series screeves, such that წერილი დაუწერია c'erili dauc'eria "He has apparently written the letter" implies that you know the letter is written because you see the letter written on a table. However, the present form წერილს დაწერს c'erils dac'ers "He will write the letter" is simply neutral with respect to the question of how you know (or do not know) that the letter will be written.