Talk:Geʽez

What is the source(evidence) for record of (proto)-Geʽez as early as the 9th C BC?

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)

I have read that aw and ay were alternated with o and e respectively

Wouldn’t it be good to include this info! SonOfAxum (talk) 14:54, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

Pronunciation in the Phonology section and "?" character's use

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)

To add to article

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

Romanisation

The article at present is a bit inconsistent on orthography—probably because editors have drawn from multiple sources, & the Western academic study of Gəʕz has itself been inconsistent in choice of Romanisation. I wanted to go through and normalise such that ቅ is always ‹q› or always ‹ḳ›, but I wasn't sure what to use as a standard. One option would be to follow the recent Tropper/Hasselbach-Andee grammar, which uses basically a comparative Semitic Romanisation. My thinking is that this is a nice choice because that grammar is the most likely to be cited in academic scholarship in coming years. (There are of course other, earlier grammars we could use instead.) It also matches Wolf Leslau's two dictionaries of Gəʕz, which at present are those a reader is most likely to use, & the TraCES edition of Dillmann's lexicon. Another good choice would be the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica Romanisation, which is more common among linguists working on modern Ethiopian/Eritrean Semitic languages, & appears in several other articles on Wikipedia. Wikipedia doesn't have a standard (as we do for, eg, Arabic), but I think that we ought to be consistent within the article. (We would probably need to get a guideline passed to be consistent across articles on Wikipedia.) My inclination is to bring this in line with the Tropper/Hasselbach-Andee/Leslau/TraCES Romanisation. That would mean that ቅ is ‹q›, ፅ is ‹ḍ›, first order is ‹a›, fourth order is ‹ā›, & sixth order is ‹ə› (or nothing). This is not my preferred Romanisation, but I think it's the one that makes the most sense. Does anyone have an opinion? Pathawi (talk) 01:47, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Tropper/Hasselbach-Andee/Leslau/TraCES looks like a good choice. How will we treat the ዐ? There's everything from Gəʕəz, Gəˁəz to Gəʽəz. I'm a big fan of 《ˁ》 and 《ˀ》 for /ʕ/ and /ʔ/, but IPA purists might object. –Austronesier (talk) 15:28, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

I use ‹ʕ› in my own writing (I guess as I've made obvious above), as I think the ˁ/ˀ pairing is too easy to misread. But I don't think we should go with my idiosyncratic preference, no matter how perceptive & clear-headed it is. If we're doing TH-ALTra, it would be either ‹ˁ› (Tropper/Hasselbach-Andee) or ‹ʿ› (Leslau & TraCES). I imagine these are meant to be the same thing, & I'm not sure how to make a principled choice on which Unicode sign is more representative of what I take to be shared intent. Pathawi (talk) 15:56, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

I've made the Romanisation consistent thruout, but haven't looked at the treatment of ዐ. It's possible that two different Unicode characters are in use: Not sure. Pathawi (talk) 13:20, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

@Pathawi: I did notice you regularized the glottal stop and /ʕ/ by using Template:hamza and Template:ayin but I don't think Wikipedia's choices for those templates (which relate to Arabic and Hebrew respectively) are the best choices. For one, Template:ayin doesn't give the same result as Template:ayn meant for Arabic (!), and Template:hamza doesn't return the Unicode mirror counterpart Template:ayin... I would like to go ahead and regularize them as glottal stop = ‹ʾ› and /ʕ/ = ‹ʿ› following Leslau/TraCES, but I wonder if we could get to agree to use @Austronesier's somewhat unusual ‹ˀ, ˁ› or even ‹ʔ, ʕ› instead which are less easy to misread. I don't see why we should care about IPA purists; it's a romanization.

Regarding English, is there any good reason to use any of ‹ʿ, ‘, ʽ› in the English spelling of the name? As opposed to the regular apostrophe, ‹'› (on Wikipedia, or ‹’› in print). I'm aware Ge'ez scholars tend to write ‹Geʿez› or even ‹Gəʿəz› as the English spelling, but both have always struck me as an unnecessary exotification (all the more so if they don't write the name in italics—at any rate, the name of the language is really Gəʿz, phonemically /gəʕz/! pace Leslau's dictionaries). I propose using ‹Ge'ez› in the article, including the article's title.

I have to say I seriously hate the ‹ʾ, ʿ› convention among Semiticists (coincidentally, there's a discussion going on over at English Wiktionary right now where someone is trying to get the community to use ‹ʔ, ʕ› for Arabic...). It simply has accessibility reading issues.--Ser be etre shi (talk) 00:21, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

I believe that all of the above templates were actually meant for Romanisation of Arabic—the two variants on عين reflect different transliteration schemata. On the Talk:Tigrinya, User:Austronesier recommended the templates to avoid the radical consonants' getting "fixed" in curly quote cleanup efforts. I too hate the convention that makes these consonants look so similar, but I would prefer to stick with a convention that readers are likely to encounter again, rather than do something idiosyncratic.

I don't imagine that scholars are attempting to to exoticise the language by writing Gəʿəz—I think they're grappling with how to represent a name which lay readers constantly misread. That said, we should go with common usage for the spelling, not scholarly transcription. Ge'ez is probably the best choice. Pathawi (talk) 07:01, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

@Pathawi: Regarding Template:ayin, what romanization of Arabic or Hebrew uses the reversed comma (U+02BD) for ay(i)n? I've never seen that. It seems like a poor choice of Unicode point on Wikipedia's part. But anyway. I suppose I'm annoyed Template:hamza and Template:ayn use ‹ʼ, ʻ› (modifier apostrophe, and turned comma or okina) since the pair is very hard to distinguish (even the half-rings ‹ʾ, ʿ› would be an improvement). But oh well. I'll just use those templates I guess; I don't mean to be combative. Maybe in the future better (more accessible) choices will be made.--Ser be etre shi (talk) 23:42, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

According to the template description, it's meant to correspond to Hans Wehr/SES. I haven't checked those. Pathawi (talk) 08:45, 25 December 2022 (UTC)

Geographic Origin of Gəʕz

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)

4th century

How can the earliest inscriptions be 4th century when Gdrt himself is not a 4th century king. Plus the Dakhanamo inscriptions are clearly Ge’ez. 2A02:C7C:3617:3200:D5AF:F63C:930B:DE0 (talk) 01:59, 31 December 2024 (UTC)