ረጂም ጊዜ ከተለያየን (rejim gize keteleyayen). Long time no see. Apologies for missing a week of #WeeklyTongue, but we are back this week with Amharic (also called Amarinya or Kuchumba).
The Afro-Asiatic language of Amharic is one of Ethiopia’s two main languages, the other being Oromo. There are about 25 million speakers.
Amharic is related to Ge'ez, or Ethiopic, and is the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox church. On a similar note, January 7 is Ethiopian Christmas.
The writing system used to write Amharic is an adapted version of Ge'ez (ግዕዝ). It is visually pleasing and is an abugida (አቡጊዳ).
[According to Wikipedia, an Abugida is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary. This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants).
The graphs of the Amharic writing system care called fidel. Each character is made up of a consonant and a vowel sequence, but the basic shape of the character depends on the consonant which is modified for the vowel.
The Ge'ez script has also been adapted to write other, mostly Semitic, languages such as Tigrinya in Eritrea and Ethiopia.
There is no set way of transliterating Amharic into Roman characters. Some ways are universal and agreed among linguists but a specific format has not been set in stone yet.
Punctuation is interesting too.
፦ Preface colon (introduces speech from a descriptive prefix)
Our friend Omniglot has a list of phrases here http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/amharic.php.
Here are some more phrases http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/resources/language/ethiopian-amharic-phrases.html
How about a dictionary? https://www.amharicdictionary.com/
Here is a nice channel on youtube to learn more https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHmMY619cfbPa3E6Uz2anLw
Sample sentences (Wikipedia)
ʾItyop̣p̣ya ʾAfriqa wǝsṭ nat
(lit., Ethiopia Africa inside is)
(lit., the boy is asleep)
u is a definite article. Lǝǧ is ‘boy’. Lǝǧu is 'the boy’
(lit., the weather good is)
areudirty
tangentwithtanner
jacobvanloon
blakekathryn
kaledo-art
dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
