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| Gafat | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Ethiopia |
| Ethnicity | Gafat |
| Extinct | (date missing) |
Afro-Asiatic
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| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | gft |
| Glottolog | gafa1240 |
The Gafat language is an extinct South Ethiopic language once spoken by the Gafat people along the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, and later, speakers pushed south of Gojjam in what is now East Welega Zone. [1] [2] Gafat was related to the Harari language and Eastern Gurage languages. [3] The records of this language are extremely sparse. There is a translation of the Song of Songs written in the 17th or 18th Century held at the Bodleian Library.
Charles Beke collected a word list in the early 1840s with difficulty from the few who knew the language, having found that "the rising generation seem to be altogether ignorant of it; and those grown-up persons who profess to speak it are anything but familiar with it." [4] The most recent accounts of this language are the reports of Wolf Leslau, who visited the region in 1947 and after considerable work was able to find a total of four people who could still speak the language. Edward Ullendorff, in his brief exposition on Gafat, concludes that as of the time of his writing, "one may ... expect that it has now virtually breathed its last." [5]
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Geʽez is an ancient South Semitic language. The language originates from what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea.
James Bruce of Kinnaird was a Scottish traveller and travel writer who confirmed the source of the Blue Nile. He spent more than a dozen years in North Africa and Ethiopia and in 1770 became the first European to trace the origins of the Blue Nile from Egypt and Sudan.
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Hiob or Job Ludolf, also known as Job Leutholf, was a German orientalist, born at Erfurt. Edward Ullendorff rates Ludolf as having "the most illustrious name in Ethiopic scholarship".
Bakaffa birth name: Missah; throne name Aṣma Giyorgis , later Masih Sagad was Emperor of Ethiopia from 18 May 1721 to 19 September 1730, and a member of the Solomonic dynasty. He was a son of Emperor Iyasu I and brother to Emperors Tekle Haymanot I and Dawit III.
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Baeda Maryam I, otherwise known as Cyriacus was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1468 to 1478, and a member of the Solomonic dynasty. His reign was characterized by a number of military campaigns, most notably against the Dobe'a who lived along the western escarpment of the Ethiopian Highlands.
Ethio-Semitic is a family of languages spoken in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan. They form the western branch of the South Semitic languages, itself a sub-branch of Semitic, part of the Afroasiatic language family.
Charles Tilstone Beke was an English traveller, geographer and Biblical critic.
Prof. Olga Kapeliuk is an Israeli linguist.
Harari is an Ethiopian Semitic language spoken by the Harari people of Ethiopia. According to the 2007 Ethiopian census, it is spoken by 25,810 people. Harari is closely related to the Eastern Gurage languages, Zay, and Silt'e, all of whom are believed to be linked to the now extinct Semitic Harla language. Locals or natives of Harar refer to their language as Gē Sinan or Gē Ritma'language of the City'. According to Wolf Leslau, Sidamo is the substratum language of Harari and influenced the vocabulary greatly. He identified unique Cushitic loanwords found only in Harari and deduced that it may have Cushitic roots.
Geʽez is a script used as an abugida (alphasyllabary) for several Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea. It originated as an abjad and was first used to write the Geʽez language, now the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Catholic Church, the Ethiopian Catholic Church, and Haymanot Judaism of the Beta Israel Jewish community in Ethiopia. In the languages Amharic and Tigrinya, the script is often called fidäl (ፊደል), meaning "script" or "letter". Under the Unicode Standard and ISO 15924, it is defined as Ethiopic text.
Chaha or Cheha is a Sebat bet Gurage dialect spoken in central Ethiopia, mainly within the Gurage Zone in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region. It is also spoken by Gurage settlers in Ethiopian cities, especially Addis Ababa. Chaha is known to many phonologists and morphologists for its very complex morphophonology.
Tigrayans are a Semitic-speaking ethnic group indigenous to the Tigray Region of northern Ethiopia. They speak the Tigrinya language, an Afroasiatic language belonging to the Ethiopian Semitic branch.
Edward Ullendorff was a British scholar of Semitic languages and Ethiopian studies.
Wolf Leslau was a scholar of Semitic languages and one of the foremost authorities on Semitic languages of Ethiopia.
Muher (Muxar) is an Ethiopian Semitic language belonging to the Gurage group. It is spoken in the mountains north of Cheha and Ezhana Wolene in Ethiopia. The language has two dialects, which are named after the first-person singular pronoun "I" they use: Ana uses əni/anä, Adi uses adi/ädi. The language is sometimes written in a modified Arabic (Ajam) or Amharic script. It has approximately 90,000 speakers.
Getatchew Haile was an Ethiopian-American philologist widely considered the foremost scholar of the Ge'ez language and one of its most prolific. He was acknowledged for his contributions to the field with a MacArthur Fellows Program "genius" award and the Edward Ullendorff Medal from the Council of the British Academy. He was the first Ethiopian and the first African to win the award.
The Gafat people are an extinct ethnic group that once inhabited present day western Ethiopia. They spoke the Gafat language, an extinct South Ethiopic grouping within the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic languages and closely related to Harari and Eastern Gurage languages. According to Alleqa Taye, in the year 1922 Gafat was only spoken privately in Gojjam due to the Amhara designating them outcasts.