ayearinlanguage: A Year in Languages, Day 14: Amharic Amharic is the official language of Ethiopia.
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Languages, Day 14: Amharic Amharic is the official language of Ethiopia. It is a member of the Semitic language family, the same family as Arabic and Hebrew. Like all Semitic languages Amharic morphology (word structure) is based on what are called “triliteral roots”. These roots are normally three, though sometimes two or four, consonants that prescribe the meaning of the word. These consonants are then nestled into vowels and affixes to give more specific grammatical function. So “ktb” is the root for “write”, “katab” is “he writes” and “kitub” is “it is written” and so on. Amharic is written in a script called Ge'ez. Ge'ez is a kind of script called an Abugida, in fact the name abugida comes from the sequence of letters in Ge'ez in the same fashion that the word alphabet is named after the first two letters of the Greek writing system. Abugidas are halfway between an alphabet and a syllabary. Consonants supply the full letters, which are then modified by diacritics to specify the vowels. -- source link