Amharic language

The Amharic or Amharic (amharic: θ,, bitterness [ämär] intended] (?·i)) is a spoken language in the north and the centre of Ethiopia, where it is included among the five official national languages, descendant of the former ge'ez language, belonging to the south-west Semitic. It takes its name from the Amhara ethnic group, also transcribed as.amara., inhabitants of the north and center of Ethiopia. Not only amhara, but the entire Ethiopian school population dominates this language.

Outside of Ethiopia, Amharic is the language of 2.7 million emigrants, who live in Egypt, Israel and Sweden. It is also spoken in Eritrea by Eritrean deportees from Ethiopia and well known to Eritreans born before the mid-1980s, as it was the language of instruction in schools in the region until 1991.

It is the second Semitic language in terms of number of speakers, behind Arabic and ahead of languages such as Tigrinya and Hebrew.

Amharic is written from left to right using an alphabetic syllabary derived from the ge'ez script. This system is called: fidäl (ፊደል), meaning "letter& #3. 4; or "character", and also abugida (አቡጊዳ), an acronym for its first four symbols. This last term is used by linguists to designate any type of writing system that has vowel and consonant characters.

There is currently no single convention for the romanization of Amharic.

Phonology

Amharic mouths in the diagram

Writing system

The abugida or Amharic or Ethiopian syllabary ("fidäl" ፊደል) has a total of 231 signs that represent syllables, the result of combining the 7 vowel phonemes with the 33 consonant phonemes of the Amharic language.

To display these characters, you may need a unicode font of the Amharic alphabet, which is available for free at Wazu Japan's Gallery of Unicode Fonts.

Names

Gender

Amharic names can be either masculine or feminine. There are different means of expressing gender. An example is the old suffix -t to form the feminine, limited to certain models and certain isolated names. Nouns and adjectives ending in -awi normally form the feminine with the suffix -t: for example, ityop':eya-(a)wi, &# 34;Ethiopian" (m.), opposite ityop':eya-wi-t, "Ethiopian" (F.); sämay-awi, "heavenly" (m.), opposite sämay-awi-t, "celestial" (F.). This suffix is also used in nouns and adjectives based on the k'et(t)ul pattern, for example, nəgus, 'king', opposite nəgəs-t "queen", and k'əddus, "holy", opposite k'əddus-t, "santa".

Some nouns and adjectives form the feminine with -it': lək, "chico" opposite lək'-it, "girl"; bäg, "ram", versus bäg-it, "sheep"; s'əmagəlle, "old man", vs. s'əmagəll-it, "old woman"; t'ot'a, "mono", vs. t'ot'-it, " cute". Other names have this feminine ending although there is no masculine opposite: this is the case of s'ärar-it, "spider", or azur-it, "swirl". There are, however, nouns that have the suffix -it and behave grammatically as masculine: säraw-it, "army"; nägar-it, "big drum".

The female gender is not only used to indicate biological sex, but also to express small size. This is the case in bet-it-u, "la casita" (literally, house-FEM-ARTICLE). The feminine morpheme can also be used to express tenderness or sympathy.

Basic vocabulary