No title

Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 21, No. 3. (Jul., 1951)

[ 2.07] STUDIES IN THE ETHIOPIC SYLLABARY EDWARD ULLENDORFF

HE Ethiopian script as known to us today is a quasi-syllabic script, each character

Tconsisting of one consonant followed by a vowel (or zero). This system developed

in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D.; we are, however, in possession of some inscriptions in which the early purely consonantal form of the Ethiopian alphabet has survived. When the Semites from South Arabia crossed the Bab el Mandeb and immigrated into that part of North-East Africa which is today the Tigre province of Ethiopia and Southern Eritrea, the South Arabian alphabet which they brought with them was, perhaps, the most important innovation they introduced into Africa. This South Arabian alphabet belongs to the Southem branch of the Semitic script, 1 but we are still not quite certain at what time it severed its connexion with the Northern alphabet.2 The Ethiopic language was thus originally written in the alphabet of its ancestral, though decidedly different, tongue. Experiments in evolving a special Ethiopian script must have begun some considerable time before the great Aksum inscriptions3 dating from the middle of the 4th century A.D. Here we have Sabaean and Ethiopian characters side by side, but it is clear that the Ethiopian script was then already so far developed that we must assume that it had come into existence, in one form or another, not later than the end of the xst century A.D. The oldest, still unvocalized, text known to us is the small inscription on the obelisk of Matara (near Senafe, Eritrea).4 Even a casual glance at the form of the characters thereon makes it appear beyond any reasonable doubt that they must have been in use some considerable time before they were employed for this inscription. Conti Rossini (Oriente Moderno, 192.1, pp. 40, 41) assumes, therefore, that the newly developed alphabet was first used'come un corsivo, d'uso giomaliero, in confronto con la scrittura sudarabica, diro cosl, classica od ufficiale '. This view has, indeed, been home out by the recent finds of small dedication inscriptions in Eritrea. Their language and characters are South Arabian, but they must originate from a time when the Ge'ez script was already fully developed and the old South Arabian alphabet was employed for orna­ mental purposes only. While the consonantal script makes its epigraphic appearance at about the same time as the fully developed vocalized Ethiopian alphabet (Littmann, Aksum Expedi­ tion), we must, nevertheless, assume that the non-vocalized characters were in use much earlier and that it is due only to insufficient epigraphic evidence that we have no knowledge whatsoever of any of the transition stages in the development of the extremely intricate system of Ge'ez vowel denotation. 1 In this connexion we may safely discard all other theories, such as the entertaining account of the Ethiopian syllabary's hieroglyphic origin in Bruce's Travels, i, pp. 4II et seq.; Salt, V.ryage to Abyssinia, calls the Sabaean characters the ' old ' and the Ethiopic ones the ' new or modern ' script (pp. 414 et seq.). 2 Cf. Lidzbarski, Ephemeris f semitische Epi-

graphik, i and ii; Driver, G. R. , Semitic writing, passim; Diringer, The Alphabet, pp. 223 et seq. 3 Littmann, Deutsche Aksum Expedition, iv. • Cf. Littmann, op. cit. , p. 61, and my Exploration and study of Abyssinia, Asmara 1945, pp. 75 et seq. Cf. also my article on this inscription in J.R.A.S., 1951·

zo8

STUDIES IN THE ETHIOPIC SYLLABARY

From a comparison of the South Arabian and Ethiopic scripts it will readily be observed that their basic forms are to all intents and purposes identical, and such slight changes as have occurred are due to: (a) the tendency towards round forms; (b) the changed direction of the writing; (c) the turn of some characters by 90 degrees (e.g. d; m; f). As the development of the Ethiopic syllabary from the South Arabian alphabet is nowadays a generally accepted fact and has been tolerably well covered in scholarly literature, 1 we may immediately turn our attention to the two main differences in these two scripts: I. The South Arabian script, in practically all documents which have come to light on African soil, had been boustrophedon (the first line generally running from right to left), whereas the Ethiopic syllabary runs from left to right. This difference is, of course, of no great importance; it is presumably due to the influence of the Greek script and has merely caused certain slight changes in the form of some letters. z. The classical Ethiopic syllabary has fewer symbols than the South Arabian alphabet: (a) Ethiopic z has taken its form from South Arabian g to which it corresponds etymologically in some cases ('azan =South Arabian 'gn), and its pronunciation from z to which it corresponds etymologically in other instances (gazama South Arabian gzm); (b) There is no Ethiopian equivalent to�; (c) There is no Ethiopian equivalent to!; (d) There is no Ethiopian equivalent to J; (e) There is no Ethiopian equivalent to g. =

With the exception of (e) all these differences are in the class of dentals, and to this fact considerable importance must be attached for the explanation of Ethiopic phonetic phenomena. In the first instance, the Ge'ez speakers would no doubt have taken over the full dental inventory of the South Arabian alphabet, had those inter­ dentals existed in their language (i.e. Ethiopic). This, in turn, means that the Semites from South Arabia had lost, in the course of a few centuries, some of the dental sounds of both Northern and Southern Arabic. How far this process was due to influence on the part of the African substrate cannot at present be stated with any degree of certainty. Secondly, certain dental distinctions which were actually taken over into Ge'ez were abandoned at a comparatively early time. The difference between 1 and s, s' and d' was still consistently observed in the early Ethiopic inscriptions, but even the oldest Ge'ez MSS. show an almost complete dissolution of all that had appeared essential in epigraphic evidence. 2 On the other hand, the Ethiopic syllabary added two sounds unknown to the South Arabian alphabet: the ejective p' and the usual p. These two symbols do not occur in any of the ol.dest Ge'ez inscriptions discovered by Littmann's Aksum expedition, and we cannot say when they were incorporated into the syllabary. While the ejective ' Mueller, Epigr. Denlrmiiler au.r Abe.r.rinien, pp. 62 et seq.; Littmann, op. cit., pp. 76-79; Conti Rossini, O. M. loc. cit.; Conti Rossini, Storia d'Etiopia, pp. 22o-22; Budge, History of Ethiopia, pp. ��o et seq.; Driver, op. cit., pa.r.rim; Diringer, loc. cit.

2 In this connexion it must, however, be admitted that no Ethiopic MS. hitherto discovered is very old, i.e. older than the advent of the vernaculars derived from Ge'ez. The gap between the great Aksum inscriptions and the oldest known Ethiopic MSS. is about Soo-900 years.

STUDIES IN THE ETHIOPIC SYLLABARY

2.09

i appears to occur in a very few indigenous words (not all of them above doubt)' and in a fair number of fully accepted loanwords (among which

'Ityop'ya is the most

prominent one), p appears only in foreign words. Its form is derived from Greek

7T.

Vowel denotation It appears that in South Arabian

w

andy were used as

matres lectionis only

in very

rare instances. The same is true for Ethiopic where the oldest unvocalized texts show a scriptio defectiva of the purest kind. Now Ge'ez, of all Semitic languages, has taken the most original course (which in many ways is also the most satisfactory one) in denoting vowels by a variety of changes (varying from very slight to fairly decisive, cf. the characters for ' or

b as opposed to those for for ' ) in the

structure of the con­

sonantal symbol. Vowels have thus become an integral part of the Ethiopian script which now assumed the character of a syllabary. It is interesting to note, however, that in spite of the not inconsiderable influence which the Greek language and script at one time exercised on the alphabet, on numerical signs as well as on the language of the Ethiopians, they did not succeed in conveying the conception of a fully independ­ ent and ' emancipated ' vowel denotation equal in importance to that of the con­ sonants. It seems that the Semitic conception of the consonantal skeleton as the carrier of the semasiological value was so deeply ingrained in the consciousness of the people that such a revolutionary method appears never to have been contemplated. It has already been pointed out above that it is probably only on account of in­ sufficient epigraphic evidence that we are unable to observe the various stages of the gradual development of this ingenious system of vowel denotation. 2 This view is not necessarily contradicted by the fact that the time gap between the consonantal and vocalized inscriptions found at Aksum must have been comparatively small. Not only is it possible that the purely consonantal text was intentionally archaizing (cf. the meaningless

mimation in some of King

'Ezana's inscriptions or the use of the South

Arabian alphabet at a time when the Ethiopic syllabary was already fully developed), but it was also considered more suitable for ornamental purposes--quite apart from the fact that a vocalized version must have seemed a somewhat unwarranted en­ graving complication at a time when the consonantal skeleton was still sufficiently well understood. The advantages of this Ethiopian innovation in vowel indication are obvious, but so are some of its shortcomings. The greatest drawback, no doubt, is that a system of this character makes for a rigidity alien to the nature and development of languages. It would be futile to go into the relative merits or demerits of the Ethiopian syllabaryJ as compared with the vowel-marking developed in Hebrew, Arabic, or 1 Dillmann (Ethiopic Grammar, para. z8) seems somewhat over-sanguine in his confidence in their native origin. 2 I cannot accept D. H. Mueller's view (op. cit., p. 70) that 'Die Reform der Schrift ist ein einheit­ liches Werk und wurde mit einem Male eingefuhrt, nicht stilckweise '. Although certain general prin­ ciples can be discerned in vowel indication, the pro­ cess must have been evolutionary and gradual. Moreover, the result is not so uniform that the hand of either one man or one school has to be postuP

lated. This also against Diringer (op. cit., p. 23 1 ), although in view of insufficient evidence it is clearly impossible to be dogmatic about either of these interpretations. 3 Cf. Driver (op. cit., p. I 38): 'syllabic writing is a blind alley from which there is no escape.' And again, ibidem: 'a syllable in which consonant and vowel are welded into a firm and indissoluble phonetic unity is a barrier to the separation of the distinct sounds such as an alphabet presupposes.'

210

STUDIES IN THE ETHIOPIC SYLLABARY

Syriac; the former might, to some extent, have benefited from the introduction of definite vowel denotation at a time when the language, in its classical and uncorrupted form, was still a living organism. In Ethiopic we have at least a fairly accurate idea of how the language sounded when spoken in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D., that is, in its most classical period. However, even here we do not attain as high a degree of accuracy as one might wish, and this is mainly due to two major shortcomings of the Ethiopian script: the absence of a sign equivalent to tafdid and the fact that the 6th order indicates a as well as vowellessness (i.e. it is at once shawa mobile and shawa quiescens). Other aspects of the method of vowel-marking in the Ethiopic alphabet have been fully discussed by Dillmann (Grammar, para. 12 et seq.) and others, and more re­ cently by Marcel Cohen in his Trait! de langue amharique, pp. 19 et seq. I would only add at this juncture that repeated inquiries in Ethiopia have yielded no information as to the reason for the traditional sequence in which the seven vowel columns are given. European scholarly sources are similarly silent. Order of Ethiopic alphabet The fact that the Ethiopic syllabary shows a sequence altogether different from that of the Canaanite-Greek alphabet has intrigued the minds of European scholars for a long time. It has given rise to many theories, some of them rather fanciful, but it seems that we have to admit that so far we have found no plausible explanation. It is, of course, possible that there is no overriding principle guiding the order of the Ethiopian alphabet and that the sequence of letter-signs is purely accidental. Dillmann's theories (Grammar, para. 10), based on Atbash rows as well as phonetic and graphic similarities, are now out of date and can no longer be accepted as the basis of serious study. The views expounded by Bauer-Leander,I too, seem extra­ ordinarily removed from reality, if one remembers that the Ethiopic syllabary de­ veloped directly from the South Arabian alphabet. Moreover, why 'for practical or didactic purposes' Canaanitic words should have been considered most suitable in Ethiopia remains obscure. h l b m f ['] r is purely coincidental and helps us as little as 'b'father ' and gd'grandfather ' in the Hebrew-Phoenician alphabet. For Ethiopic a much more plausible'didaktische Wortreihe ' would be hi(= exist);bmf(=uterus, womb); r ['] s (=head); . . bt (=house), &c., but I would not wish to demand acceptance of this explanation, though it seems less forced than the one suggested by Bauer-Leander. Professor G. R. Driver (Semitic writing, p. 185) thinks that'in the Ethiopic alphabet shape accounts for the order of hI b m f and k n ' k and w , and phonetic value accounts for that off p, while a combination of phonetic value and assonance of name determines the order of t' p' s' d'. . ' There seems, indeed, little doubt that-as in the case of the Arabic alphabet­ similarity of shape has some influence in determining the sequence of letters. This .

'

.

.

1 (Histori.rche Grammatik, pp. 66 et seq.) 'doch deutet der wohl kaum als Zufall zu betrachtende Umstand, daB die ersten sechs Buchstaben [of the Ethiopic alphabet) h I ?I m J [') r die kanaanaischen Worte "das Brat, (das) Fleisch" ergeben, daraufhin,

daB diese Reihe ebenfalls in Kanaan entstanden ist. Es lage ihr dann eine zu praktischen oder didakti­ schen Zwecken angefertigte kanaanaische Wort­ reihe zugrunde '.

STUDIES IN THE ETHIOPIC SYLLABARY appears evident in the case of band

n,y

(6th order)1 and

d, p'

and

2.II

s1•

In view of the

singularly vague phonetic notions of Ethiopians I would doubt whether phonetic value has influenced the order except, perhaps, in the most obvious cases. Such an instance might be s1 and d1, but it does not apply to J and s; h, �and b or' and •, &c. ;f and p cannot be considered to fall within this category, asp was a later Greek­

influenced addition to the alphabet occurring in foreign words only and unknown to epigraphic documents of the Aksumite period; it was simply placed at the end of the syllabary. The traditional sequence of the Ethiopic syllabary does not thus admit of any ready explanation nor does it submit to any obvious underlying principle. As things stand at present we have to assume that the order in which the letters appear is pre­ dominantly accidental.

Names of the letters of the alphabet It will not be necessary here to go into the whole problem of alphabetic nomen­ clature which would be impossible without entering into a full discussion on the basis of the other Semitic languages.2 It will suffice in this connexion to draw atten­ tion to some discrepancies in our existing knowledge and to consider indigenous tradition in this field. The oldest European source in which the names of the letters of the Ethiopic alphabet appear is the preface to the Ethiopic New Testament which was printed in Rome in 1548.3 Over a hundred years later Ludolf (Historia Aethiopica, liber iv, cap.

1)

printed the same names, but, unfortunately, he does not tell us whether his

informant Gregory had any knowledge of those allegedly indigenous names or whether he, Ludolf, copied them without consultation with Gregory. Collation of the letter-names given by the Roman New Testament, Ludolf, Dill­ mann, Isenberg, Praetorius, Conti Rossini and others will show that the differences

between them are, on the whole, insignificant, often only interchanges of the 1st and 4th, or ISt and 6th order. One will also notice that, apart from one or two obscure

Hqy), nearly all of them are practically identical with the Hebrew Nun has become Nahas and Yod-Yiiman (as ·�d would have been use­ less), but Peh was translated and became 'Af without regard to the loss of the other­

names (such as nomenclature.

wise consistently applied acrophony. From this we have to conclude that, while the Ethiopic syllabary proceeded inde­ pendently in the determination of the order of the letters, it was obviously strongly influenced by the names of the Hebrew and, conceivably, Greek alphabets. These conclusions may not, however, be sufficiently far-reaching in view of the following facts:

(a)

the Ethiopian letter-names as printed in European books from

' Which occurs much more frequently thany (1 st order). If similarity of shape really was the criterion in this case, then the order of the letters of the alpha­ bet must have been introduced later than the 4th cent. A.D., when the vocalized forms first appeared. 2 For this see Noeldeke, Beitriige zur semilischen Sprachwissenschaft, Strasbourg 1904, pp. 131 et seq.;

1548

onwards

and for the most recent account Driver, op. cit., pp. 161 et seq. 6 Testamentum Novum cum Epistola Pauli ad Hebraeos . . . Quae omnia Frater Petrus (Comosi) Aethiops auxilio priorum sedente Paulo lll Pont. Max. imprimi curavit a.s. MDXLVIII.

212

STUDIES IN THE ETIDOPIC SYLLABARY

are generally unknown in Ethiopia, even in the most traditionally learned places such as Debra Libanos or Bizen; (b) we possess no known indigenous manuscript which contains these names; (c) the modem Abyssinian languages have developed on altogether different lines in this respect. As to (a) there is an impressive degree of unanimity in contemporary accounts, Europeans stressing the universal Ethiopian disclaimer of all knowledge of these names and indigenous sources passing over them without any mention. In this con­ nexion Isenberg's (Amharic grammar, p. 4) evidence (though to a much lesser extent his conclusions) is of interest. In 1840 he found in Ethiopia that the names of the letters have been delivered to us from remote antiquity; and as most of them, if not all, are significant, we think it but proper to preserve them. They must have been formerly in general use among the Abyssinians, else it is not conceivable how they should have been transmitted to Europeans;

about them,

but the natives of the present day know nothing

except from the schools of the Missionaries. 1

Isenberg's argument that 'they must have been formerly in general use, else it is not conceivable how they should have been transmitted to Europeans ' is, of course, far from being cogent. Every literate Ethiopian knows the names of the Hebrew alphabet through the alphabetically ordered psalms (and the psalter is enormously popular in the country), so it is quite feasible that either Europeans or their native informants applied the Hebrew names-or rather their nearest possible approximation-to the Ethiopian syllabary. A similar view was first advanced by the learned 'AHi.k'a Tayya (Mittwoch, Traditionelle Aussprache, p. 9) who came to the conclusion that'der Abessinier, der I 5 48 in Rom das Neue Testament habe drucken lassen, habe diese Namen nach den griechisch-hebraischen Vorbildem erfunden, und Ludolfs Lehrer sei dem Beispiele jenes Abessiniers gefolgt '.2 This conclusion, in one form or another, seems indeed inevitable, especially when we remember that there is still today a living tradition of the Ge'ez language in Abyssinia, so that it would be almost impossible to envisage the teaching of Ge'ez in monasteries and other traditional schools (unbroken throughout the centuries) without the use of the letter-names, had such names indeed ever existed. Nor could such a knowledge have been completely lost; circumstances in Ethiopia would have been most unfavourable to such an event. Furthermore, as we have seen above, there is no Abyssinian source, recent or ancient, which discloses any knowledge in this respect. On the contrary, there is a tradition-prevalent in all the three major modern Abyssinian languages-which can 1 In a footnote to this Isenberg further remarks: ' the Abyssinians do not at all dislike to have names put to their hitherto unnamed letters; many of which are the same as those which they know, from the Psalms, to bdong to the sacred language of the Old Testament. Many of the most learned Abyssinians have applied to the Missionaries for the express pur­ pose of learning the names of their own letters. . . .' a I have only just seen a note mentioning a per­ sonal communication from Ignazio Guidi to Conti Rossini (reported by the latter in his article ' 'Awda

Nagast ', p. 13, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici, 1941): ' rammento che Ignazio Guidi mi manifestava il sospetto che, in realta, i nomi fossero stati foggiati dal Mariano Vittorio ad imitazione dei greci e degli ebraici, mancandone una documentazione antica, e sembrando averli ignorati, nel 1513, il Potken . . . .' It should perhaps be added that Marianus Vic­ torius was the author of Chaldeae seu Aethiopicae linguae institutiones, Rome 1548, and Potken was the editor of the Alphabetum seu potius Syllabarium literarum Chaldaearum .', Rome 1513· •

•

STUDIES IN THE ETHIOPIC SYLLABARY

213

be traced back at least a hundred years (and which may, conceivably, be very old) in which an altogether different system of nomenclature is adopted. Praetorius, who in his monumental Amharische Sprache (1879) had already pointed out that the old names of the letters were nowadays completely ' in Vergessenheit geraten ', drew attention to the fact (op. cit., p. 18) that all letters are called by their normal sound in the first order/ e.g. la, rii,Ja, &c. The only exceptions to this rule are those letters which are no longer distinguished in pronunciation. They alone possess names known to every Abyssinian, whether Tigrinya-, Tigre- or Amharic­ speaking, as follows: (a) h- ha/Yeta; /1- /Jamar; !J- bazu!Jan; (b) f- naguf; s- 'asat; (c)'- 'a/Yej; '- 'cryn; (d)s1-s1a1ot (also s1almat and s1adak1); (e) d'- d'a/Jcry.

These Ge'ez names are not only used when Ge'ez spelling is discussed, but they are universally applied to all modern Abyssinian languages that are written in the Ethiopic alphabet, even if these languages themselves have abandoned those distinctions. If my view that the 'old ' letter-names in Ethiopic are of comparatively recent and non-indigenous origin is correct, then it will be readily understood that some sort of nomenclature must have been introduced at a fairly early date (certainly before the end of the first millennium A.n.) , in order to distinguish such letters as had lost their characteristic pronunciation. This assumption concerning the age of the above nine names appears to find confirmation in their acceptance over the entire Abyssinian language field. Indeed, the fact that these names are common Abyssinian property might conceivably point to a period before the modern languages had succeeded Ge'ez, although it has to be admitted that the universality of this nomenclature could also be explained through the traditional methods of Ge'ez instruction. The principle underlying these names is not necessarily that of acrophony, but rather the choice of a representative and frequently occurring word in which the desired sound has a prominent position: !J- bazu!Jan; s- 'asat opposite /1- fiamar or d'- d'a/Jcry. If.amar is exclusively a Ge'ez word; Tigrinya, Tigre and Amharic use marka·b.2 'Esat occurs in all but Tigrinya where /Jawwi is used. In Amharic bazu the operative consonant is missing. 'A/Yej and 'cryn are no doubt derived from the Psalter (the alphabetically ordered psalms), and s'almat and s'adak1 take in some schools the place of the usual s1alot. The tradition regarding these names must thus have been old and powerful enough to counterbalance the facts that (a) most of these distinc­ tions have become meaningless in the pronunciation of the modern languages, and (b) some of the names are not even part of the ordinary vocabulary of those languages. Abba Ya'qob Gebreyesus in his grammar of Ge'ez (in Amharic) and his grammar of Tigrinya (written in Tigrinya) does not give names to any of the symbols of the ' Cf. also Mittwoch (Trad. Ausspr., p. 8): Der Abessinier kennt den Begriff des Konsonanten fiir sich iiberhaupt nicht, sondem kann ihn sich immer nur in Verbindung mit einem Vokal vorstellen. Das ist auch bei sadu der Fall, das neben der Vokal­ losigkeit auch den unbestimmten Vokal a be'

zeichnet. ' 2 In other words : the names of the letters have universal currency, although the objects incidentally represented by these words (e.g. ' ship ', ' fire ', &c.) are, in some cases, called differendy in the various languages.

STUDIES IN THE ETHIOPIC SYLLABARY

214

Ethiopic syllabary except to those nine sounds mentioned above: ' There are three h sounds: h- ha/Veta; �- �amlir; b- bazuban are their names.'1 or: 'f-This s sound is called naguf;' 2 &c., &c. but: 'r- is the 6th letter2' &c., &c. The names of the Ethiopic letters thus provide one instance where indigenous tradition and external evidence allow us to arrive at the same conclusions. Innovations in the script-as compared with Ge'ez Ludolf in his Grammatica Linguae Amharicae shows that the sign for palatalization originally consisted of two points which were attached on each side to the head of the letter. Later this was generally written as a small line on top of the letter, but in the case of z the original method was preserved, while with t' the additions were made to the foot of the letter, although Ludolf still uses both methods.3 These six additional symbols are nowadays named in the normal manner (as discussed in the previous section) : fii, ea, &c. Ludolf, however, calls them by analogy with the European­ invented names of their basic forms: shat, tjawi, gnahas, &c., &c. D'Abbadie in his Catalogue de manuscrits lthiopiens, Paris 18 59, states that these addi­ tional letters 'usites pour les langues vulgaires de l'Ethiopie sont appeles arabilflfa, d'apres l'idee erronee qu'ils sont tous necessaires pour peindre les sons de la langue arabe ' M. Cohen, in his Traite, p. 18, also says that'en Abyssinie ces lettres sont souvent appelees lettres arabes ya' arab ftdaloc, terme qui ne doit pas etre pris comme impliquant reellement une origine arabe '. I do not know whether M. Cohen's state­ ment is based on independent evidence or whether he followed d'Abbadie's lead, but I have been unable to confirm the allegedly indigenous designation of yli' ariib ftdaloc in Ethiopia. If they are collectively named at all, then most people call them yamaralflfa ftdaloc ( ' Amharic letters ') and this term is used by Tigrinya and Tigre speakers as well. Cf. Abba Ya 'qob, Tigrif!Ja grammar, p. 16. We know nothing about the origin of these new letters or the date of their inven­ tion. They were well known to Ludolf and his informant towards the end of the 17th century. Among Ethiopian MSS. in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the earliest occurrence of such a letter seems to be in a manuscript to be dated not later than the end of the 15th century.• There might conceivably be earlier evidence elsewhere. In any event the invention of these signs must have taken place some time between the 9th and the 15th centuries. The nature of palatalization cannot be discussed here; it should only be mentioned now that there is not sufficient evidence to regard palatalization as due to Amharic influence, although superficially much would point in that direction. Nevertheless, whether by Amharic influence or not, both Tigrinya and Tigre possess these palatal­ ized sounds and not only in Amharic loan-words. � occurs in a number of Ethiopian languages, while �1 is generally limited to Tigrinya. They are not phonemically distinct from their respective plosives and their .

1 Mii.flljafSiiwasaw Ziif?'az (sicf), Asmara 192.0 (i.e. 192.7). p. 7· 2 Nay tagraiiiia .riilva!lw, Asmara 192.6 (i.e. 1933), P· 13·

3 Ludolf (op. cit., p. 3): 'Caeterum observo Habessinos in pingendis literis inter se nondum saris convenire.' 4 MS. Oarke Or. 39, passim.

STUDIES IN THE ETHIOPIC SYLLABARY

2.15

employment generally corresponds to Hebrew b g d k p t rules. In Amharic, too, If is not a separate phoneme; it is normally identical with k, but its pronunciation in Shoa is /z, which it sometimes replaces in writing. It has long been recognized that the most serious disadvantage of the Ethiopian script is the absence of a sign showing the doubling of a consonant equivalent to Arabic ta!did. 1 The position in the Ethiopian languages is particularly serious because gemination is not only of phonetic importance, but is very often indicative of morphological distinctions. At the moment we are, however, only concerned with the graphic expression of gemination, and it must remain a matter for astonishment that Ethiopians have not made more persistent and more successful attempts in this direction.2 This is parti­ cularly noteworthy as it happens not infrequently that disagreement over gemination arises among Abyssinians themselves, and not only as regards the pronunciation of Ge'ez, but also with respect to the modern languages.3 The introduction of a sign to indicate gemination is thus mainly confined to European philologists.4 Ludolf tells us in his Amharic grammar that Gregory, his informant, used to indicate gemination by means of an apostrophe placed over the consonant in question. In most of his own works, however, Ludolf preferred to use Arabic ta!did, although this is by no means consistently applied. Littmann, in his Princeton Tigre texts, has employed ta!did throughout and thus greatly enhanced their value. M. Cohen uses in his writings the trema which, on his evidence, was first introduced by Abba Takla Maryam Samharay. Mework, op, cit., p. 2.1, promises to employ'un piccolo puntino', but later on hardly ever marks words accordingly, although this would have been very useful. Ethiopian MSS., in very rare instances, show the Ethiopic character for t1 in the 6th order over a letter requiring gemination. This small t1 was not written at the time the manuscript was produced, but was added later on by pupils on the instruc­ tion of their teachers. I have frequently observed a Dabtara interrupting his pupil with the word 'at1bak1'reinforce ' (imperative), and a good pupil would then note this in the manuscript. Grebaut (ROC 1918/19, p. 408) quotes a few instances where /;1 instead of t1 is thus employed, i.e. final k1 of 'at1bak1 in the place of root initial 11• 1 Here-unlike in the expression of vowels­ Ethiopic did not devdop beyond the South Arabian script from which it had inherited this state of affairs. The Syriac script is similarly deficient in this respect (although here this deficiency is of less im­ port) and whether or not reinforcement of a con­ sonant has taken place we can only find out with certainty in the case of b g d k p t. In Accadian, on the other hand, graphic repetition is not necessarily a sign of gemination, nor is gemination, when it actually does take place, always graphically expressed. 2 When this question was brought before the Tigrinya Language Council in Asmara in 1944 (see my note in Ajrie-a, xix, x, January, 1949, pp. 63-64), indigenous opinion seemed to concentrate on the aspect that the difficulty was due to the fact that in the Ethiopian script one cannot double a consonant

alone without doubling the entire syllable; also that there was no 'doubling ' of consonants in Ethiopic, no 'gemination', but only reinforcement', the allocation of additional breath to a sound. 3 Therefore Mework's remark (Gramm. Amar., p. .zo) ae-cio lo straniero poua esattamente prollllll­ ziare le parole omits to mention the occasional difficulty which indigenous speakers themsdves encounter. 4 Cohen has pointed out in his NoiiVelles ltlllies (p. x8) that his earlier view (jollf'llal AsialifJ118, 1921, p. 235) that laJdidwas employed in an Ethiopic MS. to mark gemination, had not taken into account that a secondary (probably European) hand had added those marks at a later period. This is, indeed, so, in my view, despite Conti Rossini's observations in Ramgna di Stlllii Etiopie-i, iv, p. 97· •

'.

•

•

'

·

STUDIES IN THE ETHIOPIC SYLLABARY

All these are merely sporadic attempts; Ethiopian languages still suffer sensibly from this graphic deficiency. Punctuation is normally only inconsistently applied, both in Ge'ez MSS. and in modern usage. The only consistent marking in MSS. is usually the two points separating words ( : ) and the full stop ( :: ) as well as the end of a paragraph

D'Abbadie (Catalogue, p. vii) gives the following punctuation marks : ( : ) pour separer les mats; ( i ) virgule; ( 1 ) point virgule; ( :: ) point; while Praetorius in his Tigrinya grammar, p. 20, has only encountered: ( �) ( :: ) ( •:ll:• ). Afework finds the absence of a consistent system of punctuation so disturbing (massime poi quando if lettore e uno straniero) that he invents one of his own (Gramm. Amar., pp. I 5-I7)which need not be set out here, as it has not met with acceptance despite his urgent entreaty addressed to his compatriots and all schools and universities where Abyssinian lan­ guages are taught. Indeed, while the absence of punctuation marks might sometimes be considered disturbing in Ge'ez, it becomes a most serious matter in the modern languages where all Semitic syntactical rules are in complete dissolution and the most involved and lengthy periods are the normal form of sentence-construction. Indigenous terminology is as follows: nat'b =point; sariiz =comma or semicolon; nak1ut1 =full stop.

For punctuation in colour see Guidi, Vocabolario Amarico, c. 404. In looking through a miscellaneous collection of letters addressed to me in Tigrinya and Amharic by Abyssinians of varying social standing and education I find that (I) ( �) (I) are indiscriminately used; only ( : ) and ( : : ) show regularity in usage. The official Ethiopian Gazette, Negarit Gazetta, employs the system known to us from the MSS., while modern Amharic and Tigrinya papers, produced at Addis Ababa and Asmara, show a tendency to dispense with the separating points al­ together. 1 But here, too, there is little consistency and in normal usage niit1b2 is employed, though perhaps somewhat less frequently than in the past. The problem of Ethiopian punctuation was discussed by the Tigrinya Language Council and the debate with its conclusions is reported in nqy 'ertra siimunawi gazetta, No. 107 of 14 September 1944: ( : ) smallest pause and for enumerations; ( 1 ) comma or semicolon; ( 1 ) colon; ( i ) question mark; ( :: ) full stop. For some time following the debate there was an endeavour at consistent applica­ tion of this system. Numerical signs. The Ethiopian ciphers were taken over from the Greek alphabet, and their form was then fashioned in such a manner as to resemble Ethiopic letters as nearly as possible. We do not know whether the Abyssinians ever used the letters of their alphabet to express numerical signs or whether they employed the South 1 Cf. especially: 'addis ziimiin, siindiifrl 'a!amaccm and nay 'ertra siimunawi gazetta. 2 niitlb (i.e. the two points ( : ) for word separa­ tion) has, of course, developed from the South

Arabian r which is used with great consistency and which can still be seen on the oldest Ge'ez inscrip­ tions.

STUDIES IN THE ETHIOPIC SYLLABARY

217

Arabian manner of numerical notation. In any event, we find the present Greek­ borrowed system already used in the earliest Ethiopic inscriptions known to us. For mathematical purposes the Ethiopian ciphers are as unsuitable as the Roman ones, and nowadays Arabie ciphers (in their European form) are increasingly used. Afework's attempts at reform

(Gramm. Amar.,

p.

6)

have never been seriously

considered. POSTSCRIPT Just before this issue goes to press news has reached me, through the courtesy of Professor A. M. Honeyman, that the South Arabian Expedition of the American Foundation for the Study of Man, under the archaeological direction of Professor

W. F. Albright, has recently discovered, at Timna', a series of paving stones in situ, marked with letters of the Qatabanian alphabet in the Ethiopic order. No details have as yet been published, but there is no doubt that the find is of the greatest importance. Hitherto no parallel was known to the peculiar order of the Ethiopic alphabet.

Résumé ETUDES SUR LE SYLLABAIRE ETHIOPIQUE CET article traite du développement de l'écriture éthiopique, dérivée, primitivement, de l'écriture de l'Arabie du Sud, et de l'influence sur cette écriture des alphabets hébraïque et grec. L'évidence de l'épigraphie et des manuscrits indique que l'alphabet éthiopique con­ sistait autrefois uniquement de consonnes; il est impossible de retracer toutes les étapes de l'évolution de la vocalisation jusqu'à l'écriture quasi-syllabique qui existe actuellement, car les preuves font défaut. Dans le Ge'ez, la méthode d'indiquer les voyelles au moyen de changements dans la structure des symboles des consonnes fut adoptée, de sorte que, maintenant, les voyelles forment une partie intégrale de l'écriture éthiopique. Cependant, malgré l'influence indiscutable de l'alphabet grec, aucune figuration indépendante des voyelles n'a été développée. Les noms des lettres de l'alphabet éthiopique ont été le sujet de maintes discussions; ils ne paraissent pas être d'origine indigène, et l'auteur les attribue à l'influence de noms hébraïques, comme on peut le voir d'après les psaumes arrangés par ordre alphabétique. L'ordre des lettres diffère de celui qui est rencontré dans d'autres langues sémitiques, fait pour lequel il n'y a aucune explication évidente. Certaines innova­ tions dans l'écriture, ainsi que diverses méthodes employées pour indiquer le redoublement des lettres, sont discutées par l'auteur. La ponctuation est illogique et confuse, et elle a fait l'objet de discussions par le Conseil de la Langue Tigrinya.