A is for Amharic

[muckefuck]

Colloquial Amharic David Appleyard. (London; New York : Routledge, 1995) vi, 373 p.

I don't know where I got this. There's no price tag on it, nothing written on the inside cover or first page (where the local used book sellers like to write), and no receipt or bookmark tucked into the pages. There is, however, a Cash Station receipt dated 12/15/89 which has written on it in Amharic:

እኔ:ባሃየል:ትልቅ:ፕቆር:ናኘ።
əne bahayāl tələk' pək'or nañ

which translates to "I am a giant [lit. "powerfully large"] duck." Or, at least, that's what the man who wrote it told me; I'm sure of every word except ፕቆር "?duck". He also added unbidden "He is a powerfully large duckling" and "She is a powerfully large duckling". (For some reason, both these versions contain the word ልጀ ləǰǰ "child" after ፕቆር.)

I know where I got that at least: At an Ethiopian restaurant in the Delmar Loop with my friend Turtle. We'd met for dinner and, while walking along to select a restaurant, found a $20 bill on the ground and decided to splurge. At the time, I was asking everyone I met who spoke a foreign language to translate this phrase for me. Reactions ranged from amused, to bemused, to downright baffled and the waiter was in the last camp.

However, wherever, whenever I picked up Colloquial Amharic, I've hardly looked at it since. I remember trying to look up a word once, discovering the index was entirely in Ethiopic script, and shelving it in dismay. This is the source of my complaint to aadroma that it "doesn't use romanisation". Perusing it last night, I now see that he was justified in his protests, though only the first five dialogues are transliterated and none of the reading passages. So its usefulness to me--a dilettante with no interest in learning the script--is limited.

But it's probably not a bad book for learning the language. Weaning off romanisations is quite healthy for the serious language learner. It follows the standard Colloquial series format, which means it employs a version of the communicative/functional approach, but it doesn't skimp on the explicit grammar. The phonological explanations are ass, but the books in the series are generally designed to be used with audio material so the authors are of the opinion you should simply try to pick up the pronunciation by imitating native speakers rather than from textual descriptions, and it's hard to fault them for this.

Trouble is, Amharic is hardly my first choice of an Ethiopic--let alone Semitic--language to learn. Tigrinya holds more appeal, but you just try to find a useful book on that. The Ethiopic liturgical language, is also pretty snazzy; I remember many fond hours snuggling up to Wolf Leslau's (RIP) Comparative dictionary of Ge'ez. (I was working on a fantasy nation based loosely on mediaeval Ethiopia at the time.)

But writing this entry prompted me to work my way through the first couple of chapters last night and I was quite struck by the similarities to Arabic, particularly in the pronouns and the basic verb forms. This shouldn't be too surprising, since linguists used to lump the two together in a single "South Semitic" branch; nowadays, it's more common to keep Arabic together with Hebrew and Aramaic in "Central Semitic", but the affinities between it an Ethiopic are still recognised. There are as many differences as similarities, of course; Amharic has some distinctly agglutinative features and the underlying triliteral root structure is almost vestigial compared to the elabouration it undergoes in Classical Arabic.

Apropos of nothing else, my given name in Ethiopic is ዳንኤል. (The sucky thing about having a dirt-common Biblical name is, well, its dirt-commonness. The cool thing is that you seldom have difficulty figuring out how to write it in the local language; whatever it is, the Christians have gotten to it before you.)

Comments

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

here's my question: in the pre-history of Islam, Ethiopian/Axumite civilisation looms quite large: there's definitely a lot of interchange between these groups. Arabic then solidifies in part through large conquests of other places (most notably Persia)... is there any way we could trace the existence of a group speaking a common language (or having the dreaded 'mutual intelligibility') between Ethiopic and Arabic in the 6th century (AD/CE)? What would this do to Islamic studies?

I know it's a historian's question (and a rather essentialist one, at that) rather than a linguist's; I'm more interested in whether there are types of evidence other than archival documents, trade records, scriptures, that a linguist would use.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

In this specific case, we happen to have records of a group of languages called Epigraphic South Arabian. Comparative studies have determined that these languages are actually more closely related to Ethiosemitic languages than to Arabic and, consequently, they are classed together in the South Semitic branch (which, as I explained previously, does not include Arabic). I'm not sure when the first South Arabian inscriptions appear, but I think it may be as early as 900 BCE--so much for your hypothesis of "mutual intelligibility" 1500 years later!

In the absence of those, linguists fall back on fuzzier measures. Attempts to develop a rigourous science of "glottochronology" have foundered on the inability to demonstrate a constant rate of language change comparable to radioactive decay. (Applying rates of change developed from analysis of the continental Germanic languages, for instance, gives a time-depth for the divergence of Icelandic from Old Norse that is laughably small--something like 200 years instead of 1000.)

Nevertheless, historical linguists seem to have strong gut feelings about the minimal amount of time it takes for divergences to reach a certain point (at least in the absence of catastrophic change such as creolisation). Even if we couldn't compare Ge'ez (well attested since about the 5th cent.) to Classical Arabic (from at least the 7th) and demonstrate their considerable dissimilarity, it would still look extremely unlikely that one could get from a common language to the tremendous diversity exhibited respectively by modern Ethiosemitic, Modern South Arabian, and Modern Colloquial Arabic.