Ethiopic Language

International Standard Bible Encyclopedia

ē - thi - op´ik laṇ´gwāj  : The language commonly called Ethiopic is the language in which the inscriptions of the kings of the ancient Aksumitic (Axumite) empire and most of the literature of Christian Abyssinia are written. It is called lesāna Ge‛ez , "the tongue of Ge'ez," by the Abyssinians themselves, most probably because it was originally the dialect of the Ge'ez tribe, who in antiquity must have dwelt in or near Aksum (Axum).

The names Ethiopia and Ethiopians have been used in many different meanings by various peoples. To the Greeks, Ethiopia was a country South of Egypt, and in this sense the word is generally used in the histories of Egypt. The Ethiopian kings came from that country which is now called Nubia in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. In Hellenistic times the term received a wider meaning, and Ethiopia was the name of all the land between the Red Sea and the Nile, south of Egypt proper. Sometimes "Indian" and "Ethiopian" were synonymous, or Ethiopia was even considered to stretch as far as to the Atlantic Ocean in the West. But of these countries the Greeks and Romans had very little exact geographical knowledge. See Ethiopia .

The fact that Ethiopia at some time meant the country between the Red Sea and the Nile prompted the pagan kings of Aksum in northern Abyssinia to adopt this name for their own country and to give it a narrower sense than the one which it had at that time. Therefore in the bilingual inscription of King Αειζανας , Aeizanas ( ‛Ēzānā ), the word Αἰθιοπία , Aithiopı́a , is a rendering of the Semitic Ḥabashat ("Abyssinia," but here more specially referring to Northern Abyssinia). Under this same king, about 350 ad, Abyssinia became Christian; and after the Bible had been translated into the Ge'ez language, the Abyssinians found that Ethiopia was mentioned there several times. Their national pride was flattered by the thought that their country should be referred to in the Holy Scriptures, and for this reason they were all the more ready to apply the name in question to their own country. Up to the present day they call it Ethiopia ( 'Itı̄ōp̣iyā ), and themselves Ethiopians; their legends speak even of an ancestor 'Ītı̄ōp̣ı̄s .

We may then, if we choose to do so, speak of a Nubian and an Abyssinian Ethiopia, but the term "Ethiopic language" has come into general usage as an equivalent of lesāna Ge‛ez , and should therefore be applied only to the ancient literary language of Abyssinia.

This language is closely allied to the languages of Southern Arabia: it represents the southwestern branch of the southern division of the Semitic languages. The most important branch of this division is, of course, the Arabic language, and with this Ethiopic has a great deal in common. On the other hand there are many words and forms in Ethiopic which are not found in Arabic, but in Hebrew or even in Babylonian and Assyrian. It has been held that the home of the Semites was in Africa; and if that were the case, the people who spoke the Ethiopic language may never have migrated very much. But the majority of scholars who have expressed their opinion upon the subject believe that Asia was the home of the Semites; this is the opinion of the writer of this article also. Then the Semitic inhabitants of Abyssinia must have come from across the Red Sea. Their migration must have begun many centuries bc. It has hardly ever stopped, since Arabs in smaller, and sometimes in larger, numbers have been drifting into Abyssinia at all periods.

The Semitic conquerors of Abyssinia found peoples of two different races in the country where they settled: (1) African aborigines and (2) Kushites, a branch of the Hamitic family. Their languages were different from each other and, of course, different from that of the Semites also; some of them are spoken up to the present day. When the Semites first came and formed their literary language, they did not allow the languages of the country to influence their own speech very much; but gradually this influence grew stronger and stronger, and it is very evident in the modern Semitic languages of Abyssinia. An outline of the history of the Ethiopic language is as follows: Its oldest monument known so far is the Semitic part of the bilingual inscription of King ‛Ēzānā , which dates from the first half of the 4th century ad. Before that time Ethiopic must have been spoken, without doubt, but it was not written: Greek and Sabean were written instead. At the time of King ‛Ēzānā the knowledge of the Sabean language seems to have been very little; but Sabean script was still used. The Semitic part of the inscription just mentioned is in the Ethiopic language, but carved once in Sabean script and a second time in the native Ethiopic script which had been derived from the Sabean. In the first of these two "editions" two or three Sabean words are used instead of their Ethiopic equivalents. A few other ancient inscriptions found in the Aksumitic empire may also be dated from the same period.

Possibly in the same 4th century the translation of the Bible into Ethiopic was begun; and this fact marks the beginning of a real Ethiopic literature. Perhaps the Psalms and the Gospels were translated first, being most needed in the service of the Christian church. The different books of the Scriptures were translated by different men, some of whom rendered literally, some more according to the sense, some having a good, some only a poor, knowledge of the language from which, and the language into which, they translated. Both Testaments were translated from the Greek by men whose mother-tongue was probably Aramaic. This is proved by the presence of Greek and Aramaic words and by the forms in which the Hebrew names appear in Ethiopic transliteration. The oldest influences which the Ethiopic language experienced were therefore: (1) Sabean; a number of technical terms may have been adopted by the ancient Aksumites from the Sabean at the time when this was their literary language; (2) African, i.e. Kushite and native African; the Semitic conquerors found a great many new animals and trees or plants, which they did not know, in their new country, and in many cases they adopted their African names; (3) Aramaic, i.e. Jewish and Christian; these are mostly words referring to religious or theological matters; (4) Greek; some of the Greek words found in Ethiopic refer to religious matters in the same way as the Aramaic, others denote objects or ideas which the ancient Abyssinians received from the civilized world, others again are mere transliterations of Greek words in the Bible and other religious books, which the translators did not understand.

The time of the Aksumitic empire was the time when the Ethiopic language flourished. This empire was overthrown probably in the 7th or 8th century ad; and we know very little indeed of the history of Abyssinia from about 700 until about 1300 ad. In 1270 the so-called Solomonic Dynasty came to the throne again; the seat of the empire, however, was no longer Aksum but Gondar, North of Lake Tsānā . Meanwhile the literary language had become a dead language; new dialects had sprung up and taken its place in everyday conversation. But Ge'ez continued to be the sacred language; it was the language of the Bible and of the church, and when in the 14th and 15th centuries a revival of Abyssinian literature came about, the literary language was Ge'ez. But it was influenced by the new dialects, especially by the Amharic, the language of Amhara, where Gondar was situated and where most of the books were written or translated. This influence affected in particular the spelling of Ge'ez in those books which dealt with religious matters and which therefore had to be written in pure Ge'ez. In historical books a great many words were taken from the Amharic; and this language, called lesāna tārı̄k , "the tongue of the chronicles," has often the appearance of mixed language.

In the 16th and 17th centuries European missionaries came to Abyssinia and tried to convert the monophysite Abyssinian Christians to Romanism. In order to come into close contact with the common people they used Amharic as a literary language, so that everybody, not only the learned, might understand their books. Their example was followed by the defenders of the native church; and since that time Amharic has become a recognized literary language in Abyssinia, although Ge'ez is still considered the real language of the church.

Amharic was derived from a sister language of the Ethiopic; the direct descendant of the Ethiopic language is modern Tigriña; a language derived from a dialect very closely related to Ge'ez is modern Tigre.

Literature

Ludolf, Historia Aethiopica , 1681; id, Commentarius ad suam historiam Aethiopicam , 1691; Dillmann, Grammatik der äthiopischen Sprache (translated into English by Crichton) 1907, Intro; Littmann, Geschichte der äthiopischen Litteratur , 1907.

Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature

As it is maintained by competent judges that the Amharic and the Tigre are really dialects of the ancient Ethiopic or Geez (which is doubted by Adelung and Vater in the Mithridates), it may be expected, from the recent progress of comparative grammar, that future scholars will apply them to elucidate the structure of the other Syro-Arabian languages. At present, however, as even the Amharic is not yet able to boast of adequate and accessible means for its study, and as neither possesses any ancient version of any part of the Bible, the Geez is the only one which claims a particular notice here. (See Amharic Language).

The ancient Ethiopic or Geez, which is the only one of the three dialects that either has been or is now generally used in written documents of a sacred or civil kind, is to be classed as an ancient branch of the Arabic. This affinity is evident from the entire grammatical structure of the language; it is confirmed by the relation of its written character to that of the Himyarite alphabet; and either supports, or is supported by, the assumption that Habesh or Abyssinia was actually peopled by a colony from Southern Arabia. The grammatical structure of the Geez shows a largely predominant identity with that of Arabic; but it also possesses some traits which are in closer accordance with the other Syro-Arabian idioms, and some which are peculiar to itself alone. The main features of its structure are as follows: The verb possesses the first ten conjugations of the Arabic verb, with the exception of the eighth and ninth; besides these it has two other conjugations which are unknown to the Arabic. There is a special conjunctive mood; the double infinitive is often used as a noun, irrespective of the absolute or construct form; the participle is wanting. The formation of nouns' resembles most that of Hebrew; but nouns often have superfluous end-vowels, which are modified in particular cases, and are analogous to the Arabic nunnation. As for the flexion of nouns, the masculine and feminine plurals are either formed by affixed syllables (an, at) on the principle common to the whole Syro-Arabian family, or by changes within the compass of the radical letters, after the manner of the so-called broken plurals of the Arabic grammar. The "construct state," and that relation of the noun which is equivalent to our objective case, are denoted by changes in the final vowels, or by employing the relative pronoun; the dative is indicated by prepositions. The comparative and superlative are expressed by means of particles. There is no form for the dual number either in the verb or the noun. With regard to the vocabulary of the language, one third of the roots are to be found in the same state in Arabic. By making allowance for commutations and transpositions, many other roots may be identified with their Arabic correspondents: some of its roots, however, do not exist in our present Arabic, but are to be found in Aramaic and Hebrew. Besides this, it has native roots peculiar to itself; it has adopted several Greek words, but shows no traces of the influence of Coptic.

The alphabet possesses twenty-six consonants, arranged in a peculiar order, twenty-four of which may, however, be regarded as essentially equivalent (although with different sounds in many instances) to the letters in the Arabic alphabet. The remaining two are letters adopted to express the Greek Φ and Ψ .

The vowel-sounds, which are seven, are not expressed by separable signs, as in the Hebrew and Arabic punctuation, but are denoted by modifications in the original form of the consonants, after the manner of the Devanagari alphabet. The mode of writing is from left to right. The position of the accent depends upon many complicated rules. As for the written characters, Gesenius has traced the relation between some of them and their equivalents in the Phoenician alphabet. There is, however, the most striking resemblance between the Geez letters generally and those in the Himyarite inscriptions, a circumstance which accords well with the supposed connection of Southern Arabia and Habesh. Moreover, Lepsius, in an interesting essay, Ueber die Anordnung und Verwandschaft des Semitischen, Indischen, AEthiopischen, etc. Alphabets (in his Zwei sprachvergleichende Abhandlungen, Berlin, 1836, 8vo, pages 74-80), has adduced some striking arguments to prove that the Devanagari alphabet must have had some influence on the development of the Geez.

The literature of the Geez language is very scanty indeed, and that little is almost exclusively of a Biblical or ecclesiastical character. Dr. Laurence has lately added considerably to this by the publication of the Book of Enoch (q.v.), the Ascension of Isaiah (q.v.), and the first Book of Esdras (q.v.), in the Ethiopic version. There also exist in Ethiopic the Christian Book of Adam (in Germ. by Dillmann, Gott. 1853), and several other apocryphal works relating the miracles of Christ, Mary, etc. It possesses nothing, not even an imitation of the national poetry, nor of the lexicographical and grammatical works of the Arabs. Some few historical works in the shape of chronicles, and a few medical treatises, constitute the main body of their profane literature. The Geez has ceased, ever since the beginning of the 14th century, to be the vernacular language of; any part of the country, having been supplanted at the court of the sovereign by the Amharic. It still continues, however. to, be the language used in religious rites, in domestic affairs of state, and in private, correspondence. See Ludolf, Grammatica AEthiopica (2d edit. Freft. 1702, fol.), and his Lexicon AEthiopico-Latinum (2d edit. ib. 1699, fol., originally Lond. 1661, 4to); Hasse, Prakt. Hdb. d. arab. u. athiop. Sprache (Jen. 1793, 8vo); Hupfeld, Exercitt. AEthiopiae (Lips. 1826, 4to); Gesenius, in Ersch und Gruber's Allgemeine Encyclopadie, s.v. Aethiopische Sprache; Dillmann, Lexicon Ling. AEthiopicae (Lpz. 1862 sq., 4to); Chrestomathia Ethiopica (Lpz. 1865, 8vo); Castell, Lexicon Heptaglottum (Lond. 1669, fol.); Schrader, De Linguae AEthiop. indole (Vien. 1860 sq., 4to). (See Shemitic Languages).