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Published: March 9th 2009
The Amharic Fidel
And you wonder why people can't read and write it!We are both learning to read and write Amharic.
Why?
Well, our attempts at learning to speak Amharic hit a bit of a dead end. We generally understand the gist of other people's conversation but we can't string sentences together to hold a proper conversation ourselves. Our vocabulary goes up slowly but it tends to be pointing and naming things rather than structured comment.
Since we arrived various people have kept telling us that learning the language is much easier if you know the Amharic fidel (alphabet). "Amharic is easy" they say "it is not like English - you say it as it is written!".
Now, strictly speaking this isn't exactly true. People speed up the pronunciation of various letters so they seem to be either silent or you don't pronounce the end of the syllable. Plus unlike English, which has 26 letters in its alphabet, Amharic has, uh, 238 letters!!!
Again, why would we undertake such an endeavour you may ask? Do we need to be able to speak Amharic?
Personally I say no we don't. It would be nice but not essential.
When challenged (almost daily) on why I cannot
Alan's fidel (so far)
189 characters down - only 50 or so to go :) speak Amharic, I reply that I have not flown half way around the world to spend two years learning Amharic; my number one priority is to teach and share IT skills. And if I had a number two priority it would be to help Ethiopian's improve their English. Should I offer a third priority then it would be to learn Amharic.
I tell people that I will happily learn Amharic so long as they don't expect me to do any work on their computers or run training courses for their IT experts! Needless to say this doesn't satisfy them for long.
But. And there is always a but. Some people HAVE said why learn Amharic as it will be useless to us after we leave Ethiopia??? Often the same people who the day before were cursing us for not knowing more Amharic 😊
Sara is SO MUCH BETTER at Amharic than you Alan There is a very common culture of comparison here, usually made in front of both parties.
One of you feels humiliated while the other knows that today's compliment will be tomorrow's criticism when the 'rival' comes out with a more complicated Amharic
Grade 1 Amharic Text Book
Might have to give Bletchley Park a call on this one... word.
We both suffer because there are two SIL (NGO) linguist Ferengis in Assosa, our friends Sherri and Andreas, and they can both speak perfect Amharic. In fact Andreas also speaks rotan, the native language of the Berta tribe here in the Assosa zone of Beneshangul-Gumuz.
"Oh, but Sherri is SO GOOD at Amharic, Sara. Why are you not as good as Sherri???" they say.
They fail to add that Sherri is a professional linguist, has been in Ethiopia 3 years (Andreas 12 years), it is their job to know Amharic and they get 8 solid months of immersion Amharic training when they first arrive in country.
I just smile when I get the treatment and suggest if Sherri is so good at Amharic why doesn't she come and build the Bureau computer network and run a few IT training courses while I learn Amharic for 6 months....?
Alan is SO MUCH BETTER at Amharic than you are Sara So partly to appease my hosts and partly as a professional challenge I decided I would learn how to write and hopefully read Amharic.
This strategy has served me well.
Not everyone can
read and write Amharic, so even if I know how to write a simple word I score double bonus brownie points. Writing someone's name gets a flabberghasted look followed by an enthusiastic clap.
It also actually helps me in my pronounciation. You realise after months of mispronouncing some simple word what the correct sound should be.
The Ethiopians I have met, for all their willingness to help you learn Amharic, are not generally great teachers.
Though to be fair Matthewos and Ayelesh are helping enormously, though they are actually teachers (or were teachers) by profession.
If you manage to say a word or two in Amharic they immediately assume you are fluent and launch into some ridicously fast, machine-gun banter that leaves you completely confused.
We have learnt to say "I don't understand" (literally translated as 'it didn't go in' or 'algabanyam'), but usually the phrase just gets repeated at the same speed and complexity.
Andreas has actually told people off for using such complexly constructed sentences on us and suggested they start much with much simpler phrases. In fact, I think (following the Ethiopian spirit of play and fun) they like to tease
Cracked it!
Note the patterns for characters 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7. Now can you spell "Halal" ? (OK, OK, it's the wrong H-family) the Ferengi!
Another problem is that people often tell us 3 or 4 ways to say the same thing! You ask what each phrase means and they say they are all the same - which gets really, really confusing.
I have just found out that for the last week I have been telling the deputy Bureau head, when he asks where someone is, that "I don't know and I don't care"!
Someone told me it just means "I don't know". Which I suppose it does; but in a completely different context 😊
It went in the left-hand side The negative comparisons Ethiopians continually use are not supposed to insult or demotivate us, they are meant to gee us up to do better; though here a cultural gap clearly exists between us. As adults doing something voluntarily, the verbal carrot is far more effective than the verbal stick.
I would also say that as native English speakers we are used to listening to the different types of English spoken around the world (and the UK!) and adjusting the speed and complexity of the way we contruct sentences is a skill you acquire pretty quickly -
First name I learnt to write
...which is probably a good thing :) whether trying to understand a jock in full flow or an African for whom English is a second or third language.
Ethiopians speaking Amharic have not yet acquired such skills. A Ferengi learning Amharic, particularly in Assosa, is so rare that I guess people aren't really clear how they should go about helping.
Amharinya (Amharic) Amharic is based on an ancient language called Ge'ez, which is only now spoken, sung and chanted (usually over loudspeakers in the middle of the night) by Ethiopian Orthodox Christian priests. In fact the software everyone installs on their PCs to type and print Amharic letters and documents is even called Power Ge'ez.
Although there are 80+ languages spoken across Ethiopia, Amharic has become the de facto language, particularly for government.
The three most powerful regions, Tigray, Amhara and Oromo have their own languages, but Amharic has kind of won through. I have been told and read that under the communist Derg regime (1974 - 1994) people were forced to learn and speak Amharic as their main language. This means that only the old might speak their mother tongue and have no Amharic at all.
Elsewhere I have read
It's me!
Well as near as dammit that some languages were traditionally never written down and because Amharic had a long history as a written language it gained acceptance. I could be wrong.
Tigrinya uses a similar script and is spoken in the northern area (Tigray Region) and Orominya (oromo Region) is spoken in the lower middle part of the country. I guess if you simply divided Ethiopia into four horizontal lines, the top band would be Trigrinya speakers, the middle Amharic, the third band Orominya and the bottom band the southern regions where many different languages are spoken.
So is everyone happy speaking Amharic?
No.
If you speak it in some towns in the Oromo region it doesn't go down well. We have been told that if you ask for a hotel room in Amharic in Oromo region (which neighbours BG, Beneshangul-Gumuz, region and we cross to reach Addis and the Metekel and Kamashi zones of BG) there will be none free. If you ask in Orominya then 'come right in, how many rooms do you need?'.
I gather that under the Derg, people who named their children with Oromo names, not Amharic names, were accused of supporting Oromo liberation groups.
Sara and Kate
She's setting you up for a sting, chicken The communist Derg wanted people to abandon the clan or tribal affiliations and embrace the idea of being 'Ethiopian'. Some people suggest this may have been because the dictator (Mengistu) was from a smaller and less well known tribe and would rather be known as Ethiopian? Though some people I have spoken too actually welcomed this movement away from old clan loyalties and politics and said it was one of the best things (of very few) the Derg managed to achieve.
One person said he was happy his ID card said "Ethiopian" rather than "Tigrayan" or "Amhara".
I am not a linguist You must have guessed that by now!
So apologies for the upcoming lingusitic analysis. And apologies that in trying to learn Amharic I still haven't managed to eradicate waffle and meandering diversions from my blog entries 😊
OK. Deep breath.
So Amharic has 240 or so regular characters and then about 30 or so irregular ones that are only used in churches apparently.
The characters are grouped into families of 7, with each character having a slightly different sound, but these sounds having a pattern that holds pretty much for
Let us in, let us in...
...by the hair on our chinny-chin-chin every group of 7 characters.
Similarly there are patterns that hold in the way the 7 characters are written across every group of 7.
So if we take the "B" sound, the first character would have an -uh added (Buh), the second character an -oo (Boo), the third character an -ee (Bee) the fourth character an -ah (Bah), the fifth an -ey (Bey), the sixth an -eurr (Beurr) and the seventh an -oh (Boh).
This gives a little ryhme like "ah, bee, cee, dee, ee, f, gee" that kids sing at school. The first character in the fidel is actually an H (and it is an exception to the above rule) so it goes "Ha, Hoo, Hee, Hah, Hey, Heurr, Ho". We amuse the people at work by singing this little kids tune to remind oursleves of the pattern.
So to spell a name like Sara, you would break it into 2 characters, Sah and Rah. The 'ah' sound is the fourth character along so you would pick the 4th along from the S-family and the 4th along from the R-family.
There are of course exceptions to this. With most of the H-families, the first
Eh?
Where are you two off to? character is actually -ah (like the fourth) and to make the whole thing a bit more of a challenge, there are FIVE different H-families. As well as THREE families of writing "S". And TWO families of writing "A" as well as "P".
Originally each of the character-families had a different sound, so there were 5 ways (or 35 if you include 7 per family) of saying "H", but the language has evolved and most of the H characters are pronounced the same.
In fact a bunch of linguists from Addis Ababa recently tried to simplify Amahric so there were not so many different characters but they clashed with the church and the amendments were never adopted. The Bible is written using all the different types of characters and the church didn't want to make any changes even though all the characters are now spoken the same way.
There are also some rules we do not yet understand about when you use the different characters. For example, Sah-Rah uses the second type of "S" not the first! Some characters are always used in names; and some not. And some characters are only ever used in a relgious context.
Oh OK!
Straight to the dustbin where Sara threw away the sardine tin! Plus there are some sounds that do not feature in English. There is a hard "T", hard "CH" as well as a hard "KUH", a "gne" and a "jeuh".
As far as I can tell, there isn't really a hard and fast way that I can follow to translate English words and names into Amharic.
For example my name is Alan Mercer, so I am Ah+Leurr+Neurr Muh+Reurr+Suh+Reurr.
You could argue (I tried) that I should just be Meurr-Seurr, but no, that got a blank look and a curt shake of the head. It's not my language so I ain't going to argue!
Patterns, of course The written characters also follow a kind of pattern.
The first character can be anything, but the second usually has a horizontal line half-way down the middle of the right leg, the third has the horizontal line a bit further down, along the bottom of the character.
The fourth character usually has the left leg shorter than the right, the fifth has a circle on the base of the right leg, the sixth character usually follows no rules whatsoever so it could be anything.
The seventh
You can look cute
But you ain't coming in :) is the opposite of the 4th - having a left leg longer than the right.
It also seems there are families of families.
For example, the S-family becomes a Sh-family if a line is added across the top of the S-characters. This also holds true for T (becomes Ch), N (becomes Gne) and K (becomes another type of A).
What I tend to do is this. Look at a character and work out which family it is from so I get the equivalent English letter. Then work out which of the seven in the family it is. This then gives you the sound to make.
My limited experience so far leads me to believe that the 6th character along often ends a word and the -eurr bit is kind of sliced off e.g. Alan is pronounced Ah-Leurr-N not Ah-Leurr-Neurr. The last bit kind of fades away as people speak it.
Are you glad you asked? 😊 At least you aren't having to learn this!
Sara briefly rebelled but we have now started using a Grade 1 school book which even so seems pretty complicated.
I am somewhat embarrased given that I am
Mango alleh!
Not long until they are ripe and Assosa goes berserk... reliably informed that the test used to check if a kid is ready for grade one (age 4 or 5) is if he can curl his right hand across his head and touch his left ear!!!
And finally? We have named two of the three cats. We have 2 girls and one boy.
The boy will be Hurley (he is ginger and eats anything), the first girl cat Sara has named Kate.
She says it's because Kate was initially shy but you get to know more about her later on (she is the only cat Sara can pick up and stroke).
I suggested she was called Kate because she is a thief and cons us out of milk every morning...(don't worry, you need to follow the TV show Lost to understand).
Pity the third cat is a female...I wanted to call it Desmond...
😊
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rob
non-member comment
hi
Hey guys, I've only recently discovered your blog - and I'm hooked. It's amazing to see your pics and hear about what you're getting up to. Such a positive vibe! x Rob