Now we’ve moved on to translating the Easter service rites. This is different because it draws from a lot of different resources for example it starts off with the daily book of prayers, then into a poem called “the Image of the Praises”, then it goes into the readings of the day from the Holy Bible, finally the part of the rites that are specific to the day draw almost completely from the Book of Psalms. Once we figured out that that’s where the phrases were coming from, we were able to look up the verses in the Ge’ez and English versions of the Psalms to locate the verse and contextualize it in the translation.
Because the document we were working on was compiled but another party, we were also going through and fixing common spelling mistakes and forms.
One big lesson I got from this project was the importance of identifying object markers. These are the different object case markers in Ge’ez:
They are seen at the end of the noun; if the noun ends in a 6th order it will go to 1st order, 3rd order → 5th order, adding a ḥā on proper nouns and names also makes it an object,
Object markers: for example with sī (3rd order) → sie (5th order) bi’sī to bi’isie, man subject form to man object form. This changed one sentence we were working on and because the sentence order was also off we needed to spot the case change in order to make the most sense of it.
I made some stylistic notes as well like using exclamation marks in the presence of an imperative or a plea. Putting these notes into action as well as reiterating simple grammatical lessons like common prepositions really feels like I’m getting the best of both. In this lesson, I learned a new term “clictic” which refers to prepositions. “In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host.” One such example is im- which may also be seen as i- depending on the noun that follows it in the word. The word itself means from, originating.
I also just realized the difference between perfect and imperfect verbs and how they are used in Ge’ez. The distinction doesn’t always make a difference in translation. Perfect is for a completed action while imperfect is an ongoing action.
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