Home > Ge'ez language

Today Ge'ez remains the main language used in the worship services of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, though Amharic (the main lingua franca of modern Ethiopia) has also been introduced in a few churches. The Ge'ez writing system, (or 'Fidel' as it is known in Ethiopia), forms the basis for most scripts used for writing the various languages of Ethiopia.

Ge'ez is also still in use by the Beta Israel Jewish community of Ethiopia for their scriptures and liturgy.

The language has been assigned the ISO 639 code gez and the SIL code GEE.

1 History

The ge'ez alphabet and the language itself is considered to have evolved under the influence of southern-arabic colonies from first millennium B.C. The first inscriptions in ge'ez are dated to 4th century A.D, although some scientist assume that this language was invented around 1st or 2nd century. It is generally considered a South Semitic language. It has replaced the Sabey language and alphabet (although that was still used up to around 8th century A.D). Ge'ez was in turn replaced around 13th century A.D. by the Amharic language in the south and the Tigre languageTigre is a Semitic language descended from Geez (just like Tigrinya to which Tigre is related) spoken in the Tigre region of Ethiopia (today in Eritrea?). in the north.

2 Ge'ez writing system

The word Ge'ez is also applied to the abugidaAn alphasyllabary or abugida (a term coined by Peter T. Daniels) is a writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one (or, which is used to write the language. The Amharic in Ethiopia and TigrignaTigrigna (or is a Semitic language spoken in Eritrea, where it is the official language, and in parts of Ethiopia and Israel. It is written in the Geez (also called Ethiopic) script. External Link Languages of Eritrea Languages of Ethiopia Semitic languag in EritreaAnother article treats the Greek city of Eretria. The State of Eritrea is a country in northeast Africa. It is bordered by Sudan in the west, Ethiopia in the south, and Djibouti in the east. The northeast of the country has an extensive coastline with the and Ethiopia use modified forms of the Ge'ez abugida. Other languages in the Horn of Africa were also historically written using Ge'ez, such as Oromo languageThe Oromo are an African ethnic group (pejoratively termed "Galla") found in Ethiopia and to a lesser extent Kenya. They are the largest single ethnic group in Ethiopia, with 40% of the population. The Oromo number approximately over 30 million. They spea and SomaliSomali language is spoken mostly in Somalia. Grammatical categories of Somali language are: Noun Pronoun Verb Adjective Preposition Determiner Focus word Classifier And finally Conjunction As you may notice here, the Somali has some grammatical categories, but these have generally migrated to Latin-based orthographies.

Ge'ez (or "Ethiopic") has been assigned Unicode codepoints U+1200 – U+137F (decimal 4608–4991):