Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VI.djvu/763

 ETHIOPIA (LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE) 751 ranch of the Semitic stem. Tigre, with its ipital Axum, was probably the first seat of it, " it spread thence with the formation of the ibyssinian empire over a larger territory, and became the chief language of the country. When the S. W. provinces gained the ascen- dancy and the seat of government was trans- ferred to them, the Amharic dialect, which was in general use in that region, rose to the rank of a court language. The Ethiopic remained, however, for nearly three centuries more the literary and business language of the empire. The invasion of the Galla tribes and the subse- quent division of the country, as well as the introduction of Mohammedanism, led gradual- ly to its extinction. The Ethiopic church con- tinued to study and use it as a sort of sacred language ; but there are probably very few among the priests who are still conversant with it. The Amharic is now the most widely spoken dialect in the regions of ancient Ethiopia. It is used, though with variations, in Shoa and the district between the Tacazze and the Abai. The Tigr6 has preserved a greater resemblance to the Ethiopic, or the language of the former Abyssinian empire. The name Ethiopic is de- rived from the classic appellation of this coun- try, and passed over from the Greeks to the Abyssinians themselves. They called their country Ki'P'&PJi Aithiopay, and their lan- guage Lesan Aithiopay. But the original native name of the people and their language is 26M, Geez, signifying emigration, and in a secondary sense emigrants, or the free. In origin and character the Ethiopic or Geez is v a pure Semitic language. It was carried by "emigrants from Yemen to Abyssinia, and with the exception of a few names of plants and animals, which it incorporated from the dia- lects current in the new country, and of a few commercial terms learned from Greek traders, it was kept free from foreign admixture. Its relation to Arabic is attested by the final short rowels in the construction of ^words, the large mmber of roots of three and four syllables, le internal formation of the plural, the con- uction of the subjunctive from the imperfect, and by many other characteristics not found in the North Semitic tongues. In other re- 3cts the difference is too great to _ warrant in classifying the Ethiopic as a dialect of Arabic. It is safe to infer that the Ethio- developed for a time, after its separation the North Semitic stem, somewhat in the irection of the Arabic, and then returned to ie principles of the parent tongue. For this reason many old Semitic forms lost in Arabic are found again in Ethiopic. This strange mixture of the old and the new leads to the con- clusion that the language passed through a his- tory of at least 1,000 years before it attained to the type presented by the texts that have come down to us. The Ethiopic system of writing differs in form and character from all known Semitic languages. It resembles the Himya- ritic, and represents with it the southern branch 304 VOL. vi. 48 of graphic systems into which the prototype of the Semitic writing was early divided. It was originally written with consonants only, and from right to left ; but the Abyssinians learned very early to write in the opposite direction, and to indicate vowel sounds by the addition of rings and strokes. The vowel signs carne into use as early as the 5th century of our era; they are superior to the methods of indicating vowels employed by other Semitic tongues. Each of the 26 consonants that compose the Ethiopic alphabet has seven distinct forms. The simple consonant is uttered with the sound of a, and its variants indicate the vowels u (pronounced like oo in boot), i, d (sounded as in father), 0, and e. The last named va- riant is often equivalent to the simple conso- nant without vowel sound. Four consonants, q, kh aspirate, &, and <7, received occasionally from the Abyssinians a peculiar pronunciation not indicated by the ordinary forms, introdu- cing the sound of u between these consonants and a, e, and i. These utterances were indica- ted by five special vowel signs. The later Ethio- pic used also the sign of ud with the value of va in connection with other consonants. In the following table of the Abyssinian characters the modifications for vowel sounds are shown in the six extra forms of the letter ha : U ha } na za J. hu A la A a 2u fa ^ M A hha ?fl ka T psa y ha (P ma (D wa X he TJJ sa H za U a J h, he ra P ja Q. u (? ho ft sa E da 2 i $ qua <1> ka 7 ga VL a V khua A ba fll ta  S ua 1 cha A tza o The Abyssinians separated words by :, sen- tences by ::, paragraphs by & or :: = ::, and sometimes also by beginning a new line. They borrowed the signs of numbers from the Greeks, introducing slight variations to assim- ilate them with their own graphic system. The Ethiopic, like most Semitic languages, constructed numerous words out of simple ver- bal roots, by adding particles, doubling one or more consonants, or changing the vowel sound. Such words formed again the stem of many other derivatives. Time was considered as either complete or incomplete, and accordingly only two tenses are distinguished, the perfect and the imperfect. The latter embraced the pres- ent and the future, and inasmuch as that which is thought and willed and that which could be, should be, or would be, fall within these con-