Talk:Geʽez

message: I merged in Gi'iz and did a very little research. Corrections are welcome.
Also, I kept the phrase 'main lingua franca' even though it sounds wrong to me - can there be more than one lingua franca in a region? Key45 03:00, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: work done

message: Was Ge'ez ever used as a primary language by any specific ethnic group? ("The peasantry" is kind of vague.) Gringo300 06:38, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think we would need to see where you read that, before we could do anything about it! Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 11:43, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I've since read that Ge'ez was spoken by an ethnic group that the Amhara and Tigre ethnic groups descended from. I've also read that the languages of those two ethnic groups descended from Ge'ez. Gringo300 (talk) 15:35, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: historical Ge'ez speakers?

message: maybe Ge'ez alphabet should be a separate article? We badly need a phoneme table, the Unicode allocations are less than useful if you want to read the script... dab (ᛏ) 12:31, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: the alphabet

message: Someone named User:Yom has reverted all of my changes. I hope these changes can be discussed here rather than starting an editing war. yhever 21:58, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  What's wrong with the changes I've made? 

message: I didn't mean to revert your changes. I was just adding a link for an edit I made earlier. I must have been editing an older version and saved over your changes. I'll revert it and edit back in my change into the new version.
Yom
: I'm sorry for responding harshly earlier, I didn't understand it was a mistake. 
: I was trying to make the transcription more accurate. The most important thing to fix was ሰ and ሠ which are s and ś, respectively, and not the other way round.
: As for ፀ, I think it is more accurate to transcribe it as ṣ́, though ḍ has been used by Wolf Leslau in his dictionaries on account of the correspondance with Arabic ض (ḍ). In modern pronunciation, "ፀ" is pronounced the same as ጸ (i.e. ṣ), but it is unlikely that this sound was a voiced ejective (I believe it is not even possible phonetically to pronounce such a sound) - and all emphatic consonants are ejectives in the traditional pronunciation of Ge'ez, and in the other related modern languages. yhever 19:59, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Oops

message: I am aware that Ge'ez and Amharic are very different languages.  Perhaps the difference should be mentioned somewhere in the article.  Since I am primarily and Arabist, working toward being a Semitist, I am incapable of adding the information.  User:Yom likely has the expertise to do so.  
IbnBatriq 19:59, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Ge'ez/Amharic

message: Wouldn't it be better if ś - l - ṣ́ would be placed on the same column under "Lateral"? 
Also, I think that classifying ṣ and ṣ́ as affricates is wrong. ṣ can find its place under s and z as "emphatic" or "ejective", and ṣ́ can be placed on the same row under "Lateral". Thus, the whole row of affricates can be removed.
One more thing, why is š in the table? The only palatals in Ge‘ez are y and the vowels i and e. yhever 15:23, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Lateral consonants

message: -was written in Hebrew in the 10th cent. (according to the highly authoritative prof David Flusser who published an annotated version a few decades ago), so its Ge'ez translation (probably a translation of the Arabic translation of the book) could not have been produced in the 5th-7th century, of course; the mistake originates from Wallis Budge p.566. I deleted it there and moved it to the next period (12-15th cent).
:A single professor may be "authoritative" to you, but the Ethiopian Church, which actually includes this in its "broad canon", is even more "authoritative" to others.  I'm sure not everyone agrees with this dating. ፈቃደ (ውይይት) 22:58, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "history of the jews" by ben gurion 

message: Just wanted to add this to the discussion, as i had previously promised to show the usage of Ge'ez in an African American film. The Ge'ez title actually appears at the end of the film, and it is also in the DVD cover. But what does it mean in Amharic?--Halaqah 22:21, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It's actually Amharic, and says "500 years later" or "after 500 years"... ፈቃደ (ውይይት) 22:54, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Correct. be-hWala, for instance, is a pure Amharic term, derived from the Ge'ez ከወላ/ከዋላ kawalā/kawālā "behind" (prefixed "be-" meaning "by, in" or showing that it's related to time). `Ametat (ዓመታት) has the -at plural more common in Ge'ez in Tigrinya, but is still standard Amharic. — ዮም | (Yom) | Talk • contribs • Ethiopia 23:31, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Image of film cover

message: You might understand the difference but it can be very confusing the language and the script, if it is at the top, as with most articles where confusion can occur it is just much better, i dont wanna read an article to realize it is the wrong thing---Halaqah 19:04, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: THere needs to be a link

message: is this written right to left (like arabic) or left to right (like english)
thanks in advance
Scott Free 20:57, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Left to right, it's predecessor script, ESA (actually first inscriptions in Ethiopia and Eritrea, though) was written in boustrophedon (right to left, then left to right, then right to left again, switching each line). — ዮም | (Yom) | Talk • contribs • Ethiopia 23:12, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  writing direction? 

message: what is geez? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 189.153.111.227 (talk) 03:25, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  science 

message: Is the Ge'ez language of the liturgy comprehensible to a modern Amharic or Tigrinya speaker who has not specifically learned Ge'ez? -- 85.179.175.225 00:23, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It wouldn't be comprehensible spoken as it was originally (to an Amharic speaker, especially), but but any Amharic or Tigrinya speaker would be able to half-understand it reading a passage in Ge'ez or listening to modern liturgy read Ge'ez, who read it with an Amharic accent (i.e. do not pronounce the pharyngeals). Probably even more if they knew the historical origins of certain sounds in Amharic and Tigrinya (e.g. sometimes an original Ts -> T' -> CH' in Amharic, cf. Ge'ez Tsewa and Amh. Ch'ewa. If you knew the historical connection, you could understand it, otherwise it wouldn't make sense). — ዮም | (Yom) | Talk • contribs • Ethiopia 01:48, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

text: It is exactly parallel to the use of Latin, and services can include a mixture of Ge'ez and local languages or be entirely in local languages. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 23:53, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Also clergy and monks might speak be able to speak Ge'ez to each other, but would not address someone in Ge'ez who does not understand Ge'ez. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 23:55, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

text: I must be missing something, what exactly is hoped to be accomplished by discussing here how "counterproductive" it may or may not be in the observation of wikipedia editors? Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 00:42, 25 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comprehensibility? 

message: I removed the portion of this article saying that the lateral fricative is "kept as a distinct phoneme in no other Semitic daughter language," since the lateral fricative actually is preserved in South Arabian languages such as Soqotri.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.135.230.236 (talk) 20:40, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lateral fricative 

message: I typed up a summary of the language and put it in the external links but it was deleted as "spam" on 22:25, 22 July 2008.  Can anyone justify this?  The move seems wholly non-sequitor to me.
English-speaking students would benefit from such exterior links.
Does anyone have any links to pages on Ge'ez as a language (grammars, dictionaries, texts) in English OR Amharic or any other language (something in German, perhaps?).
Epigraphist (talk) 15:41, 17 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: WP:COI does not refer to "arguments" on a talkpage, or the ability to make them -- how absurd!  It means editing articles to promote your own website or business, which many wikipedians naturally tend to resent, so it's against guidelines, and Mesfin is not being "petty" in his application of it.    Your claims regarding your own credentials vs. his are also entirely out of place on this project.  There are so many project pages I would suggest you read, but start with WP:EL (that stands for external, not exterior links), WP:AGF, and maybe even WP:DICK.  And whether or not someone is at a "professional conference" is, I think, completely vainglorious in the long run, at least for establishing linguistic expertise.  It's sort of like saying someone has to be at a "conference" to have Ethiopian citizenship, when in fact it has always been the Ethiopian Constitution that will determine who can and cannot have Ethiopian citizenship.  But I think these things are liable to go over your head.  It is good that you are studying the Ancient Ethiopian language, but it's statements like yours that make non-Ethiopian students of Ge'ez look arrogant, like as soon as they learn a little something, they are suddenly unsurpassed experts on the subject and may lecture everyone else.  And I didn't see any problems at all with Mesfin's English either, but ironically I see a few awkward errors in yours that make me wonder. If you have any actual scholarly light to shed on the article, as opposed to trying to get an angry reaction, then by all means, please share it with us. Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 22:03, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Need for Exterior Links

message: Where does the latin transliteration (used on this and similar pages) come from? The use of ə and ä looks quite idiosyncratic to me... -- megA (talk) 23:10, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: on this page it comes from the tradition of Ge'ez scholars. And it is better to follow their way because they know the difficulties and pitfalls of transliterating the language of they are spacialists of. Transliteration is not a straight forward task you know. Hakeem.gadi (talk) 05:05, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I didn't mean to criticize, I was just curious. This information should be included into the article. -- megA (talk) 12:39, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Latin transliteration? 

message: Somebody should decide how the vowels are to be transcribed. In the grammar sections, the sixth order vowel is transcribed with ǝ; in the text example it's i. In the phonology section, two of the vowels are i.
-- MikeG (talk) 19:09, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Transliteration consistency? 

message: I copied this from the Gez(a locale in France), after I created a redirect from there to here.--Jondel (talk) 06:46, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  GEZ

message: Could we add a reference to Ethiopian philosophers Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat? Seems to me they would be well worth a mention in the History and literature section.
The difficulty here is that there has been some dispute about authenticity. It was argued by Carlo Conti Rossini and Eugen Mittwoch that the work was a forgery by an Italian priest, Giusto d'Urbino. That was in the 1920s and 1930s, and my impression is that scholarly interest pretty much dried up at that point. More recently, though, Claude Sumner argued in the 1970s, on stylistic and other grounds, that it was not a forgery after all (or at least that the person alleged to have forged it could not have done so). But his stuff seems to be pretty obscure, and I'm not sure if there's been any back-and-forth since then. But there is some work out there now operating on the assumption that Sumner is correct. Sumner's argument (and references to other stuff) is contained in Ethiopian Philosophy, vol. II: The Treatise of Zara Yaecob and Walda Hewat: Text and Authorship, Addis Ababa: Commercial Printing Press, 1976. I have not investigated it terribly closely, though at present I'm satisfied by it. Here is a brief summary of his reasoning and conclusions from his Classical Ethiopian Philosophy (1985). 
Perhaps someone (more scholarly than myself) has a better understanding of this? And if no one has anything to say about this in the next week or so, I'll add a reference to those authors. bhritchie (talk) 03:17, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Philosophy in Ge'ez? 

message: Don't delete the pronunciation unless you have something better to replace it with.  It is not at all obvious how Ge'ez should be pronounced, and it's obscure enough that very few of our readers will have ever come across it.  — kwami (talk) 00:04, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Anything would be better than the sources you are imposing, the pronunciation according to them sounds idiotic. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 00:25, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that linguists and lexicographers the world over are idiots for not agreeing with you.  However, WP is written for idiots, so idiotic pronunciations are appropriate.  — kwami (talk) 02:00, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation 

message: The website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has pictures of about 12 (out of 142) beautiful pages of The Harp of Praise, a late 17th-century illuminated prayer book from the Lasta region of Ethiopia, in the Museum's collection. The script is Ethiopic and the language presumably is Ge'ez, as that was and is the language of Christian worship in Ethiopia. There is also a 19th century manuscript prayer book with travel case. But the article leaves off at the 16th century.
I realize that without proper documentation that they are in Ge'ez, these documents cannot legitimately be included in the article. But I'm putting them here in case someone else can find such evidence.
However, the Met website does show (parts of) two manuscripts it describes as being in Ge'ez:
* a double-sided Gospel leaf, first half 14th century
* an illuminated Gospel, late 14th–early 15th century
I'm adding these to the last paragraph of Ge'ez language#History and literature, right after the British Museum holdings.
--Thnidu (talk) 02:25, 25 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Illuminated and post-16th-c. manuscripts 

message: I have updated this article to use the ‘correct’ character for representing the glottal stop, ie the ʻOkina, within the body of the text. I confirmed this is the correct character by consulting Bright’s ‘The World’s Writing Systems’ (p. 98). However, it occurs to me that ideally this should be also reflected in the title of the article as well (as with the ʻOkina example). Of course this is a typographic quibble, but IMO it is an important one. pablohoney (talk) 22:05, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proper Latin script typography of name ‘Geʻez’ 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I have reverted the reference to obsolete scholarship that proposed that Syrian monks may have been responsible for the Ethiopic Bible translation.  We need a seperate article on the Ethiopic Bible - and I am working on it - but in the meanwhile it should be enough to note that the theory of Syrian origins has been comprehensively relinquished by all current scholarship.  The Aksumite translators of the 4th (and maybe 5th) centuries, worked solely from Greek for their New Testament; and most likely solely from Greek for their Old testamant and pseudopigrapha too.  And they did it all on their own - with no assistance from outsiders.  By the time of the Nine Saints (late 5th, early 6th, centuries) the whole Bible, and a great deal more, was already translated. TomHennell (talk) 12:41, 19 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ethiopic Bible 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Geʽez is not extinct, it's dead. The infobox says something along the lines of "it's no longer used natively, but still has liturgical use." That's the definition of a dead language, not an extinct one. Unfortunately, I don't know how to change information in infoboxes, so if someone else could do it, it would be much appreciated!
User.name.here (talk) 00:12, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Geʽez is not extinct 

message: A discussion is taking place to address the redirect :Geez. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 August 21#Geez until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion.  Soumya-8974 talk contribs subpages 09:49, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Geez" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: Some sources say it was first recorded at ̥5th century BC while others say 4th Cent. CE  — Preceding unsigned comment added by SonOfAxum (talk • contribs) 05:29, 20 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is the source(evidence) for record of (proto)-Geʽez as early as the 9th C BC? 

message: Wouldn’t it be good to include this info! SonOfAxum (talk) 14:54, 29 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  I have read that aw and ay were alternated with o and e respectively 

message: Under the first-level heading Phonology, second-level heading Consonants, third-level heading Phonemes of Geʽez, there is table of consonants with IPA pronounciation symbols. The cell for emphatic x dental contains a "?", and the cells for voiceless x plain and voiceless x labialized contain superscript "?"s by the "chi" symbol. Are these meant to be glottal stops?
:The answer is in the text that immediately precedes the table: "Question marks follow phonemes whose interpretation is controversial". –Austronesier (talk) 07:53, 26 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation in the Phonology section and "?" character's use 

message: Basic information to add to this article:  the etymology of the word "Geʽez." 173.88.246.138 (talk) 02:48, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: To add to article

message: There's been a short back-&-forth on whether Gəʕz originated in Eritrea, or in both Eritrea & Ethiopia. The most recent edit draws on the primary evidence, which is definitely very interesting stuff. However, it's worth holding in mind that our job isn't to interpret the evidence: We use secondary sources, tertiary sources when need be, & primary sources only for what they directly say or as interpreted thru secondary sources WP:PST. I hope that this points toward a way to resolve this more easily. Pathawi (talk) 14:13, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Geographic Origin of Gəʕz