[Multilingual Monday] Script Revisions -- Amharic
It's quite easy to find fault in the current writing system used with Amharic, which uses a variant of the Ethiopic script found in the now-liturgical language Ge'ez [click], and immediately some problems might be immediately noticable. One minor gripe is that, for example, ም can be either /mï/ or just /m/, and can be fairly unclear when a vowel is supposed to be spoken, and when one is not. The bigger problem is the redundancy -- there are many pairs of consonants that are pronounced identically in this language, and there is even the case of FOUR consonants -- ህ, ሕ, ኅ, and ኽ -- which are all pronounced as /h/. This is the fault of maintaining historic spellings of words that are borrowed from places like Ge'ez, where these letters represent separate sounds (indeed, even other languages using the script like Tigrinya have differentiation of these letters).
Not so clear in that website is the lack of marks for gemination. Now, in many languages (like English) there's not a huge difference in pronunciation between a single and a double consonant. However, in Amharic, this gemination is clearly pronounced and can change the meaning of a word, yet these are not differentiated in the script. This can be seen in አለ, which can be either alä, "he said," or allä, "there is". An "umlaut" that represents a geminated consonant has been used by certain writers in the Amharic language who felt the script needed reform (and indeed there's even a Unicode symbol specifically for this purpose), but it's not caught on in use on any kind of scale.
The script's changes from order to order (in other words, the change from a "ka" to a "ke" to a "ki", etc.) are also somewhat inconsistent, especially when you get to the sixth order where there's at least ten patterns that can be seen in terms of physical changes that a character from the first order will go through in order to become a sixth order character. This had led to a fairly unfaithful and ugly typewriter font that required a user to go back and repeatedly type over the same character over and over with different elements [click], even if it didn't end up actually resembling the intended letter in the end. Also, the larger number of strokes per character had also led naysayers to point out that cursive was impossible with the script (this and lack of gemination representation being two points brought up when the Oromo had decided to use a Latin-based writing system rather than use an Ethiopic script in the early 90's).
I had found a site with Emperor Menelik's cursive Amharic, and I have to admit, I'm split on my feelings of the script revision, and this may be one of many reasons that it simply didn't pick up -- Amharic has been in use for quite some time, and has a huge source of its vocabulary and history from the Ge'ez langauge. That being said, wouldn't changing to a system like this immediately cut those who use the language off from a history of text that goes back centuries? Do other groups who use the Ethiopic script follow? Surely things get more complex as you go to, say, Tigrinya, which uses more orders (-wa, -wi, etc.) and can't eliminate the letters Amharic can because they ARE, indeed, letters representing different sounds and not redundancies? It's not to say, of course, that a writing system needs to remain inconvenient or inappropriate for a given language ...
(I admit, I think the cursive script's kind of fugly, so I already have biases! ^^;;;. :: laugh ::)
Not so clear in that website is the lack of marks for gemination. Now, in many languages (like English) there's not a huge difference in pronunciation between a single and a double consonant. However, in Amharic, this gemination is clearly pronounced and can change the meaning of a word, yet these are not differentiated in the script. This can be seen in አለ, which can be either alä, "he said," or allä, "there is". An "umlaut" that represents a geminated consonant has been used by certain writers in the Amharic language who felt the script needed reform (and indeed there's even a Unicode symbol specifically for this purpose), but it's not caught on in use on any kind of scale.
The script's changes from order to order (in other words, the change from a "ka" to a "ke" to a "ki", etc.) are also somewhat inconsistent, especially when you get to the sixth order where there's at least ten patterns that can be seen in terms of physical changes that a character from the first order will go through in order to become a sixth order character. This had led to a fairly unfaithful and ugly typewriter font that required a user to go back and repeatedly type over the same character over and over with different elements [click], even if it didn't end up actually resembling the intended letter in the end. Also, the larger number of strokes per character had also led naysayers to point out that cursive was impossible with the script (this and lack of gemination representation being two points brought up when the Oromo had decided to use a Latin-based writing system rather than use an Ethiopic script in the early 90's).
I had found a site with Emperor Menelik's cursive Amharic, and I have to admit, I'm split on my feelings of the script revision, and this may be one of many reasons that it simply didn't pick up -- Amharic has been in use for quite some time, and has a huge source of its vocabulary and history from the Ge'ez langauge. That being said, wouldn't changing to a system like this immediately cut those who use the language off from a history of text that goes back centuries? Do other groups who use the Ethiopic script follow? Surely things get more complex as you go to, say, Tigrinya, which uses more orders (-wa, -wi, etc.) and can't eliminate the letters Amharic can because they ARE, indeed, letters representing different sounds and not redundancies? It's not to say, of course, that a writing system needs to remain inconvenient or inappropriate for a given language ...
(I admit, I think the cursive script's kind of fugly, so I already have biases! ^^;;;. :: laugh ::)