ZOO-

What do the words "zoo", "zver", "dzveli", "dzalian" have in common with the "-dze" surnames? They seem to be sharing the same root.

The Greek root "ζωο" (zoo) - "live-" - echoes a whole family of Georgian words: "zueba" (birth), "dze" (child), "dzveli" (old, i.e., elderly), "dzver" ("animal" in Svan), "dzala" (strength and derivative from it "dzalian" - "very"), "dzudzu" (chest), "dzu" (female predator). All of them are related to "life" and "birth". Now it's even scary to think why the Georgians called "Saturn" with the word "zuali". What did they know about Saturn that others didn't?

The alternation of "z" and "dz" should not be confusing. Georgians themselves alternate these two letters quite easily. In addition, in ancient Greek "zeta" was pronounced as "dz" (in Italian at the beginning of the word it is still pronounced that way).

But there are questions about vowels. In Georgian, it is clearly [u]. And in Greek we have an interesting combination of two "o" - "omega" and "omicron". Omega was always presented to us as long "o", but now it seems that this letter coincides with "W" in form for a reason. In ancient Greek, the letter might have represented exactly the half-vowel "W", which finds confirmation in the Latin omega, later replaced by epsilon (which is known to convey the sound [u]).

If all this makes sense, then we arrive at the correspondence of the Greek root "zo" to the Georgian "dzu".