[Multilingual Monday] Script Revisions -- Amharic

[aadroma]

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

Comments

[tenderandtough]

I have to admit, you kind of lose me on the monday posts. But they are fascinating to read. It's like I get to go to school for free. :o) You've got to be one of the smartest guys I know.

[dr_tectonic]

I would argue that redundancy is not necessarily a problem in need of a solution. One of the reasons why English orthography is so complicated is that spelling encodes not just pronunciation, but also a lot of information about etymology, and that can be quite useful. Just seeing that an unknown word is latinate rather than germanic in spelling tells you something about the meaning.

To what degree is Amharic in the same boat? Even though they're pronounced the same, is it useful to a reader of Amharic to know which of the Ge'ez /h/ sounds a word originally had, if only on an unconscious level?

[aadroma]

From my understanding, there's a historical spelling of a word in Amharic -- a good example is ሦስት, sost, "three" (the two characters represent two different consonants, both of which are pronounced s). As opposed to English, however, this is NOT the only way you will see this word spelled, and ANY of the consonants that are pronounced as s, can be used in its place, and THAT is why the redundancy is much less of a "feature" in Amharic as it is in English.

That being said, online and print dictionaries will only show the "historical" spelling, and that historical connections reveals the word's ties to Ge'ez and various Semitic languages.

[dr_tectonic]

Hmm... so it sounds to me like the problem is not the spelling system, but the fact that most writers in Amharic are lousy spellers! ;)

[aadroma]

Hehehe, but the language ALLOWS them to be shitty spellers, and says it's okay to spell a word any of 7,572 different ways! :: chuckle ::

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[muckefuck]

Well, none of these objections prevented the Lao from jettisoning all the unnecessary letters from the Thai alphabet. (And you think Amharic is bad! At least it only encodes distinctions which were once made. The Thai alphabet is copied wholesale from an Indic script and, thus, contains letters for all kinds of distinctions which have never been made in any Tai language!) Then again, the relationship is different, with Lao being more in the position of Tigrinya (i.e. official language of a smaller, more peripheral country and minority language in the larger country) and, therefore, less likely to serve as a kind of model for Thai.

BTW, on a similar note, what do you think of the Soviet reform of Yiddish orthography?