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Amsalu Aklilu (2 September 1929 – 19 December 2013) was a distinguished lexicographer of Amharic and a language professor at Addis Ababa University, [1] a major figure in Ethiopian studies. He was born in Dessie , Wällo, attended a local church school and later attended and graduated from Holy Trinity Secondary School, in Addis Ababa .
Amharic is an Afro-Asiatic language of the Southwest Semitic group and is related to Geʽez, or Ethiopic, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox church; Amharic is written in a slightly modified form of the alphabet used for writing the Geʽez language. There are 34 basic characters, each of which has seven forms depending on which ...
There are multiple ways to write some letters in Amharic as some of the sounds that were once used in Geʽez are non-existent in modern Amharic. At the cost of redundancy, Amharic speakers retain the archaic letters in their orthography to preserve the Geʽez origins of many of their words. Also, the English approximations are sometimes very ...
In languages that use it, such as Amharic and Tigrinya, the script is called Fidäl, which means script or alphabet. Geʽez is read from left to right. The Geʽez script has been adapted to write other languages, usually ones that are also Semitic. The most widespread use is for Amharic in Ethiopia and Tigrinya in Eritrea and Ethiopia.
[12] [29] [1] [30] [31] Amharic is the most widely spoken and written language in Ethiopia. As of 2018, Amharic was spoken by 31.8 million native speakers in Ethiopia [6] with over 25 million secondary speakers in the nation. [6] Although additional languages are used, Amharic is still predominantly spoken by all ethnic groups in Addis Ababa.
The Ge'ez alphabet (Ethiopic script), is used in East Africa for the Agaw languages, Amharic language, Gurage languages, and the Tigrinya language among others. The syllabary evolved from the script for classical Ge'ez , which is now a liturgical language .
The Afar language is spoken as a mother tongue by the Afar people in Djibouti, Eritrea, and the Afar Region of Ethiopia. [1] According to Ethnologue, there are 2,600,000 total Afar speakers. Of these, 1,280,000 were recorded in the 2007 Ethiopian census, with 906,000 monolinguals registered in the 1994 census. [1]
Ethio-Semitic (also Ethiopian Semitic, Ethiosemitic, Ethiopic or Abyssinian [2]) is a family of languages spoken in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan. [1] They form the western branch of the South Semitic languages , itself a sub-branch of Semitic , part of the Afroasiatic language family .