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Studies in the Ethiopic Syllabary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2012

Edward Ullendorff
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Extract

The Ethiopian script as known to us today is a quasi-syllabic script, each character consisting 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 Bābel 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 Southern branch of the Semitic script, but we are still not quite certain at what time it severed its connexion with the Northern 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 consistait 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 innovations 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , July 1951 , pp. 207 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1951

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References

page 207 note 1 In this connexion we may safely discard all other theories, such as the entertaining account of the Ethiopian syllabary's hieroglyphic origin in Brace's Travels, i, pp. 411 et seq.; Salt, Voyage to Abyssinia, calls the Sabaean characters the ‘old’ and the Ethiopic ones the ‘new or modern’ script (pp. 414 et seq.).

page 207 note 2 Cf. Lidzbarski, , Ephemeris f. semitische Epigraphik, i and iiGoogle Scholar; Driver, G. R., Semitic writing, passimGoogle Scholar; Diringer, , The Alphabet, pp. 223 et seqGoogle Scholar.

page 207 note 3 Littmann, , Deutsche Aksum Expedition, iv.Google Scholar

page 207 note 4 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.

page 208 note 1 Mueller, , Epigr. Denkmäler aus Abessinien, pp. 62 et seq.Google Scholar; , Littmann, op. cit., pp. 76–79Google Scholar; Rossini, Conti, O.M. loc. cit.Google Scholar; Rossini, Conti, Storia d'Etiopia, pp. 220–22Google Scholar; , Budge, History of Ethiopia, 550 et seq.Google Scholar; , Driver, op. cit., passimGoogle Scholar; , Diringer, loc. citGoogle Scholar.

page 208 note 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 800—900 years.

page 209 note 1 Dillmann (Ethiopic Grammar, para. 28) seems somewhat over-sanguine in his confidence in their native origin.

page 209 note 2 I cannot accept D. H. Mueller's view (op. cit., p. 70) that ‘Die Reform der Schrift ist ein einheitliches Werk und wurde mit cinem Male eingeführt, nicht stückweise’. Although certain general principles can be discerned in vowel indication, the process 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 postulated. This also against Diringer (op. cit., p. 231), although in view of insufficient evidence it is clearly impossible to be dogmatic about either of these interpretations.

page 208 note 3 Cf. Driver (op. cit., p. 138): ‘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.’

page 210 note 1 (Historische Grammatik, pp. 66 et seq.) ‘doch deutet der wohl kaum als Zufall zu betrachtende Umstand, daß die ersten sechs Buchstaben [of the Ethiopic alphabet] h l ḥ m š [‘] r die kanaanäischen Worte “das Brot, (das) Fleisch” ergeben, daraufhin, daß diese Reihe ebenfalls in Kanaan entstanden ist. Es läge ihr dann eine zu praktischen oder didaktischen Zwecken angefertigte kanaanäische Wottreihe zugrunde’.

page 211 note 1 Which occurs much more frequently than y (Ist order). If similarity of shape really was the criterion in this case, then the order of the letters of the alphabet must have been introduced later than the 4th cent, A.D., when the vocalized forms first appeared.

page 211 note 2 For this see Noeldeke, Beiträge zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft, Strasbourg 1904, pp. 131 et seq.; and for the most recent account Driver, op. cit., pp. 61 et seq.

page 211 note 3 Testamentum Novum cum Epistola Pauli ad Hebraeos… Quae omnia Frater Petrus (Comosi) Aethiops auxilio priorum sedente Paulo III Pont. Max. imprimi curavit a.s. MDXLVIII.

page 212 note 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 belong to the sacred language of the Old Testament. Many of the most learned Abyssinians have applied to the Missionaries for the express purpose of learning the names of their own letters.…’

page 212 note 2 I have only just seen a note mentioning a personal 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 realtà, 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 Victorius 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.

page 213 note 1 Cf. also Mittwoch (Trad. Ausspr., p. 8): ‘Der Abessinier kennt den Begriff des Konsonanten für sich überhaupt nicht, sondern kann ihn sich immer nur in Verbindung mit einem Vokal vorstellen. Das ist auch bei sadəs der Fall, das neben der Vokallosigkeit auch den unbestimmten Vokal ə bezeichnet.’

page 213 note 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 differently in the various languages.

page 214 note 1 Mäslhaf Säwasəw zägə’əz, (sicl), Asmara 1920 (i.e. 1927), p. 7.

page 214 note 2 Nay tagnňňa säwosəw, Asmara 1926 (i.e. 1953), p. 13.

page 214 note 3 Ludolf (op. cit., p. 5): ‘Caeterum observo Habessinos in pingendis literis intet se nondum satis convenire.’

page 214 note 4 MS. Clarke Or. 39, passim.

page 215 note 1 Here—unlike in the expression of vowels—Ethiopic did not develop 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 import) and whether or not reinforcement of a consonant 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, no r is gemination, when it actually does take place, always graphically expressed.

page 215 note 1 When this question was brought before the Tigrinya Language Council in Asmara in 1944 (see my note in Africa, xix, 1, 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.

page 215 note 3 Therefore Afework's remark (Gramm. Amar., p. 20) ‘…acriò lo straniero possa esattamente pronunziare le parole’ omits to mention the occasional difficulty which indigenous speakers themselves encounter.

page 215 note 4 Cohen has pointed out in his Nouvelles études (p. 18) that his earlier view (Journal Asiatiqae, 1921, p. 235) that tašdid was 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 Rassegna di Studi Etiopici, iv, p. 97.

page 216 note 1 cf. especially: ‘addis zämän, sändäkl ‘alamaččsn and nay ’ertra sämunawi gazetta.

page 216 note 2 nätlb (i.e. the two points (:) for word separation) has, of course, developed from the South Arabian l which is used with great consistency and which can still be seen on the oldest Ge'ez inscriptions.