Silt'e language

Silt'e (ስልጥኘ or የስልጤ አፍ ) is a Semitic language spoken in central Ethiopia, mainly within the Silt'e zone in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region, and by speakers of the language who have settled in Ethiopian cities, especially Addis Ababa.

Speakers and dialects

Dialects of the language include Azarnat, Enneqor (Inneqor), Ulbarag (Urbareg) and Wolane.

Sounds and orthography

Consonants and vowels

Silt'e has a fairly typical set of consonants for an Ethiopian Semitic language.There are the usual ejective consonants alongside plain voiceless and voiced consonants, and all of the consonants except and can be geminated, that is, lengthened.However, Silt'e vowels differ considerably from the typical set of seven vowelsin languages such as Amharic, Tigrinya, and Ge'ez.Silt'e has the set of five short and five long vowels that is typical of the nearby Eastern Cushitic languages, which may be the origin of the Silt'e system.There is considerable allophonic variation within the short vowels, especially for a; the most frequent allophone of , , is shown in the chart.All of the short vowels may be devoiced preceding a pause.

The charts below show the phonemes of Silt'e.For the representation of Silt'e consonants,this article uses a modification of asystem that is common (though not universal) among linguists who work onEthiopian Semitic languages but differs somewhat from theconventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet.When the IPA symbol is different, it is indicated in brackets in thecharts.The symbols and (glottal stop) appear in parentheses because they play only a marginal role in the system, because it appears in only a few words in the Azarnat dialect and because (as in Amharic) it is often omitted.

Orthography

Since at least the 1980s, Silt'e has been written in the Ge'ez, or Ethiopic, writing system, originally developed for the now-extinct Ge'ez language and most familiar today in its use for Amharic and Tigrinya.This system makes distinctions among only seven vowels, so some of the short-long distinctions in Silt'e are not marked.In practice this probably does not interfere with comprehension because there are relatively few minimal pairs based on vowel length.In written Silt'e, the seven Ethiopic vowels are mapped onto the ten Silt'e vowels as follows:
* ä �' a: አለፈ alafa 'he passed'
* u �' u, uu: ሙት mut 'death', muut 'thing'
* i �'
** ii: ኢን iin 'eye'
** word-final i: መሪ mari 'friend'
** i ending a noun stem: መሪከ marika 'his friend'
** impersonal perfect verb i suffix: ባሊ baali 'people said'; በባሊም babaalim 'even if people said'
* a �' aa: ጋራሽ 'your (f.) house'
* e �' e, ee: ኤፌ eeffe 'he covered'
* �'
** i (except as above): እንግር ingir 'foot'
** consonant not followed by a vowel: አስሮሽት 'twelve'
* o �' o, oo: ቆጬ 'tortoise', 'he cut'

External links

*http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=xst
* Christian recordings in Silt'e in Global Recordings website.

Bibliography

*Cohen, Marcel (1931). Études d'éthiopien méridional. Société Asiatique, Collection d'ouvrages orientaux. Paris: Geuthner.
*Gutt, E.H.M. & Hussein Mohammed (1997). Silt'e - Amharic - English dictionary (with a concise grammar by E-A Gutt). Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University Press.
*Gutt, E-A. (1983). Studies in the phonology of Silti. Journal of Ethiopian Studies 16, pp. 37-73.
*Leslau, W. (1979). Etymological Dictionary of Gurage (Ethiopic). 3 vols. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. ISBN 3447020415