This is a version of an original posting made at EthioSciences and soc.culture.african on April 13th, 1994. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thank you Mr. Apola for your question regaurding the difference between Ge'ez script and Ethiopic. There are distinct differences between the two scripts (both terms are used loosely with regularity to refer to one another) and I would like to explore the differences in reply to you by way of a tour of the rich history of Ethiopic script. This is the best that I have been able to learn it, I hope others will add and make corrections to what I am able to offer below. Ge'ez is the official language of the Ethiopian church and has been since its foundation. The Ge'ez script and language both predate the church, the script has evolved through many forms and flourished over the centuries while the language perished (dialects of Ge'ez grew to become Tigrinia and Tigre) only to remain spoken amongst present day trained preists. The origins of Ge'ez script is well known, it is the Mino-Sabaean, or Sabaean for short. From Jensen (1) : " At about the beginning of our era (0 AD implied) South-Arabian Semites migrated from Habashat on the Arabian coast across to Africa and founded a kingdom there with its capital at Axum. This Axumite or Abyssinian kingdom reached its highest point in the fourth century, while at the same time it became Christianized and accessible to the Greek spirit. The immigrant Semites called themselves "Ge'ez", i.e. the "imigrants". During the first centuries they used the Sabaean script for the representation of their language, the so-called Ge'ez language; it was replaced, however, in about 350 by another form, the Old Abyssinian script. This script in its later form, transmitted in manuscripts and usually described as the Ethiopic or Ge'ez script." As Dawkins (2) observed Ethiopic script has its roots in beauty as well : " The Sabaean offshoot from the main branch of the South-Semitic alphabet, a graceful, very elegant script consisting of twenty-nine letters, spread into Africa. There it became the progenitor of the Ethiopic alphabet, and this in turn gave birth to the modern Amharic, Tigre, Tigrinya and other alphabets of modern Ethiopia. These are the only South-Semitic alphabetic scripts still in use today." The Old Abyssinian script must have come into being when spoken Ge'ez had mutated to the point that the imported Sabaean script could no longer provide the same facility to the Ge'ez (now Axumite) people. A major over haul was given to the script then. There were 5 characters dropped, and later 2 new ones added (P and p) bringing the Ge'ez alphabet upto its well known 26 characters. Other small modifications were also made to the characters. A second departure was from the writing practices of the original Ge'ez scribes: writing would now be left to right instead of the traditional Semitic practice of right to left (the earliest form of the old Abyssinian script was read in "plow style" -right to left, then left to right and back). The change in the direction of writing did not effect the form of the characters save for "r" which would now be drawn in its mirror image. A 3rd very important and interesting thing occured at this same time. Again from Jensen : " Old Abyssinian inscriptions exhibit no kind of vowel indication until about A.D. 350. But along side these, vocalized inscriptions are also found and in the book script writing with vocalized consonant-signs had come to prevail completely. Through this, the Ethiopic script has a great superiority in clarity over the other kinds of Semitic script, written purely with consonants, and it can be said without hesitation to be the most complete of all varieties of Semitic script." At this point Old Abyssinian script was no longer an "alphabet" but now a "syllabary". The full 26x7 Fidel (Version 1 Release 1) is what is almost always refered to as "Ge'ez script". This is also the point I will state where the term Ge'ez should stop and Ethiopic begins. It is important to note a 2nd distinction between Ge'ez and Ethiopic fidel; not only do the number of letters in the fidels differ, but so do the SOUNDS of the characters that are common to both sets. Referring to the fidel given in one of my previous postings, characters that have different sounds (were lost) from the modern day are : s2, h3, and S2. The phonetic symbology representing the sounds of these characters I could not duplicate for you readily in 7 bit ascii. The sounds are still used in modern day Arabic and I can offer a list of corresponding arabic characters if requested. When characters are added to the basic 26x7 Ge'ez fidel, the appended character set should then be referred to as "Ethiopic". When other languages adopted the Ge'ez fidel as thier written script it became necessary to add new characters to the fidel to represent spoken sounds that did not occur in spoken Ge'ez. The next fidel to come about is the 33x7 tradditional version that you will find most readily in childrens' school books. Quoting loosely from Marcel Cohen (3) : " There were seven sounds of old amharic that did not have ge'ez letters to represent them. A standard was developed by amhara scribes to represent one of these sounds by drawing 2 dots above the ge'ez letter having the sound most similar. These two dots were usually connected with a thin line, and so the modification then resembled a hat ._. When the amharic fidel was established these additional letters would follow the originals that they were modifications of. These 7 letters are : x, c, N, K, Z, j, and C. "Z" and "C" are exceptions to the "hat" rule that identifies the additions made to the original ge'ez fidel." Yes, I realize "K" is now more of a tigrinia phoneme than amharic, and that the same ._. was added to "q" to create "Q". I do not know who did what first so please do not flame me on this. Educate if you can. If you believe amharic is a man made language created by Zagwe emperors for secret code, then the amharic letters would have been added to the fidel somewhere in the interval 1095 - 1365 AD (March '94 Ethiopian Review). Historians observe the amharic characters appearing "...in about the middle of the fourteenth century" (1). The same ._. was later added to "b" to create "v" (mostly for foreign words though "vo" is common in Chaha) and Wolf Leslau (4) proposed the same modification for representing 4 sounds in Chaha and other Gurage languages (the characters may predate Leslau's use). There are also the diqala or "bastard" 8th form characters added to 18 characters in the modern Ethiopic fidel plus 24 (more by Leslau's count) others added for the diqala forms 9 - 12. An implosive "d" is another modern addition. In the 17th century the fidel changed fashion when scribes began to draw characters with a more rounded and decorative look -as we know it today (it had been more angular in the 13th - 15th centuries) (1). Otherwise the Ethiopic script has changed very little since the syllabarification. It is important to keep in mind that a person capable of reading in Ethiopic would not be able to read correctly in Ge'ez for the sound differences; a modern priest (or other) trained to read Ge'ez script could not read the Old Ge'ez (right to left alphabetic) script, and a person capable of reading Old Ge'ez may not be capable of reading texts in Mino-Sabaean. Two persons, one knowing only Latin the other Ethiopic script, will find familiar shapes in the Sabaean but the script will appear equally alien to both viewers. Finally, the term "Ethiopic" may also refer to 20 numbers and (as many as) 10 punctuation marks in addition to the characters. Throughout the ages Ethiopic script has adapted to the needs of its users and is still changing. A few years ago there was a movement amoung scholars at AAU to expand the fidel further to include all of the sounds of all languages of Ethiopia. The end of the war is a likely cause for the interuption of the project. Should the project restart we will see our beloved fidel grow yet again. yours, danEl Additional : The Origin of the Mino-Sabaean Script. The South Semitic scripts were unknown until the 1830s and have a clouded geaneology at best. Several ancestries are likely; South Semitic came from the North Semitic, the North Semitic came from the South Semitic, both came from the Early Canaanite, or they both have different anscestors (the NS Canaanite, the SS Palaeo/Sinaitic) and influenced each others development. Diringer leaves this as an open question, Jensen favours the Sanai origin. Who Influenced the Decision to go Syllabic? The syllabic nature of the Ethiopic script is a highly confounding oddity in the region. There is only one other place in the world where this type of script is found : " Friedrich rightly points out that `the principle, not at all self- evident, of making consonants with inherent ~a into the normal form, and of expressly denoting absence of vowel in a consonant, is found only in the Indian script and nowhere else; above all, it is completely alien to the other Semitic alphabets.' Littmann, too, is of the opinion that the principle of the vowel-indication was imparted to the Christian missionaries of Abyssinia (Frumentius and Theophilos, c. A.D. 300) by Indian missionaries, and recalls that at the time of the Roman Empire extremely brisk trade existed between the Mediterranean and India across Ethiopia. A fresh creation after a foreign (in fact Indian) model may come closer to the truth than the assumption of a completely new creation on such a peculiar principle, as Grohmann for instance suggests."(1) The Amhara "sh" : Why was the Amharic character following "s" ("x", sounds like "sh") added to the fidel? The Ge'ez (26x7) fidel already had a character for for this same sound it is "s2" (see fidel posted previously). Though the sound was lost in the characters use in Tigrinia and Amharic, it should have still been known to priests and scholars of mid 14th century. Alternate Histories of the Script. At various stages during the development of the script one may hear a different accounting of events in folk lores and mythology that try to tie together a directed development, by the church and kings, of the script and languages as part of a grand scheme. Fighting between Muslim and Christian leaders, even infighting within the church can be traced back to a spark from the implication of a script issue. These tales that bring in elements of the supernatural will have different endings depending on who is doing the telling. You are unlikely to find historical evidence to support these tales but they are held fast to by true believers. A German graduate student is even said to have been slain by loyalist church workers (Sekota, 1978?) for getting too close to the Fidel's secrets. References Sited 1. Jensen, Hans, Sign, Symbol, and Script; An Account of Man's Efforts to Write. New York, NY, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1969. 2. Diringer, David, Writing, New York, NY, Frederick A. Praeger Inc., 1962. 3. Cohen, Marcel, Traite de langue Amharique, Paris, 1936. 4. Leslau, Wolf. Ethiopians speak; studies in cultural background. Vol 2, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1965. 5. Coulmas, Florian, The Writing Systems of The World, New York, NY, B. Blackwell, 1989.