Silt'e language

Silt'e (ስልጥኘ [siltʼiɲɲǝ] or የስልጤ አፍ [jǝsiltʼe af]) is a Semitic language spoken in central Ethiopia, mainly within the Silte Zone, in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region and by speakers of the language (today called Silt'e), who have settled in Ethiopian cities, especially Addis Ababa.

Speakers and dialects

Dialects of the language include: Azernet-Berbere, Silti, Wuriro, Ulbareg and Wolane.

Sounds and orthography

Consonants and vowels

Silt'e has a fairly typical set of consonants for an Ethiopian Semitic language. There are the usual ejective consonants, alongside plain voiceless and voiced consonants and all of the consonants, except /h/ and /ʔ/, can be geminated, that is, lengthened. However, Silt'e vowels differ considerably from the typical set of seven vowels in languages such as Amharic, Tigrinya and Ge'ez. Silt'e has the set of five short and five long vowels, that is typical of the nearby Eastern Cushitic languages, which may be the origin of the Silt'e system. There is considerable allophonic variation within the short vowels, especially for a; the most frequent allophone of /a/, [ǝ], is shown in the chart. All of the short vowels may be devoiced preceding a pause.

The charts below show the phonemes of Silt'e. For the representation of Silt'e consonants, this article uses a modification of a system that is common (though not universal), among linguists who work on Ethiopian Semitic languages, but differs somewhat from the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet. When the IPA symbol is different, it is indicated in brackets in the charts. The symbols /p/ and /ʔ/ (glottal stop) appear in parentheses, because they play only a marginal role in the system, /p/, because it appears in only a few words in the Azarnat dialect and /ʔ/, because (as in Amharic), it is often omitted.

Orthography

Since at least the 1980s, Silt'e has been written in the Ge'ez, or Ethiopic, writing system, originally developed for the now-extinct Ge'ez language and most familiar today in its use for Amharic and Tigrinya. This system makes distinctions among only seven vowels, so some of the short-long distinctions in Silt'e are not marked. In practice this probably does not interfere with comprehension because there are relatively few minimal pairs based on vowel length. In written Silt'e, the seven Ethiopic vowels are mapped onto the ten Silt'e vowels as follows:

• ä → a: አለፈ alafa 'he passed'
• u → u, uu: ሙት mut 'death', muut 'thing'
• i →
  • ii: ኢን iin 'eye'
  • word-final i: መሪ mari 'friend'
  • i ending a noun stem: መሪከ marika 'his friend'
  • impersonal perfect verb i suffix: ባሊ baali 'people said'; በባሊም babaalim 'even if people said'
• a → aa: ጋራሽ gaaraaš 'your (f.) house'
• e → e, ee: ኤፌ eeffe 'he covered'
• ǝ →
  • i (except as above): እንግር ingir 'foot'
  • consonant not followed by a vowel: አስሮሽት asroošt 'twelve'
• o → o, oo: ቆጬ k'oč'e 'tortoise', k'ooč'e 'he cut'

Bibliography

• Cohen, Marcel (1931). Études d'éthiopien méridional. Société Asiatique, Collection d'ouvrages orientaux. Paris: Geuthner.
• Drewes, A.J. (1997). "The story of Joseph in Sïlt'i Gurage", in: Grover Hudson (ed.), Essays on Gurage language and culture: dedicated to Wolf Leslau on the occasion of his 90th birthday, November 14, 1996, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, pp. 69-92.
• Gutt, E.H.M. & Hussein Mohammed (1997). Silt'e - Amharic - English dictionary (with a concise grammar by E-A Gutt). Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press.
• Gutt, E.-A. (1983). Studies in the phonology of Silti. Journal of Ethiopian Studies 16, pp. 37-73.
• Gutt, E.-A. (1991). "Aspects of number in Silt'i grammar", in: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa), pp. 453-464.
• Gutt, E.-A. (1997). "Concise grammar of Silt'e", in: Gutt, E.H.M. 1997, pp. 895-960.
• Leslau, W. (1979). Etymological Dictionary of Gurage (Ethiopic). 3 vols. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. ISBN 3-447-02041-5
• Wagner, Ewald (1983). "Selt'i-verse in arabischer Schrift aus dem Schlobies-Nachlass", in: Stanislav Segert & András J.E. Bodrogligeti (eds.), Ethiopian studies dedicated to Wolf Leslau, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, pp. 363-374.

External links

• Silte Music Live
• http://www.siltie.com
• Webaja Silte Discussion Forum
• http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=xst
• Christian recordings in Silt'e in Global Recordings website.