October 6th
110 Reflection 3:
This week in class with my language partner, I was able to get down the simple past conjugations for verbs. The first one that you learned is for third person, singular, masculine conjugation. This is the first form of the verbs in Ge’ez. I’m not exactly sure how to refer to that in the grammatical sense but I believe it is the equivalent of the “infinitive” form — the form with which the verb is primarily referred to as. An example is the verb “to sleep”, in Ge’ez it is deqese, which means “he slept”. This is the past, third person, singular, masculine form of the verb but it is the simplest way to refer to it and all verbs follow this nomenclature. In spanish it would be dormir and you know it is the infinitive form because of the -ir (-ar,-er in other verbs) ending or morpheme. The ending, “se” [sæ], which is the first character out of 7 variants of the “s” is what indicates the gender and plurality. The sound for the first character is always consonant + [æ]. The second is consonant + [u]....
3rd: + [i]
4th: + [a]
5th: + [e]
6th: + [ɘ] or no vowel depending on where it falls in the syllable
7th: + [o] or [ɔ]
This is the transliteration standard that we (our ‘Resource & Translation’ team at church) created to serve for the documents we work with. We have two vowel families አ and ዐ (These characters are both pronounced [a] in Ge’ez but [æ] and [a] with what seems to be more voicing but I’m not sure what the secondary manner difference is for this one)
አ and ዐ | a |
አ and ዐ | e |
ኡ and ዑ | u |
ኢ and ዒ | ī |
ኤ and ዔ | ie |
እ and ዕ | i |
ኦ and ዖ | o |
I really like relearning mechanics of linguistics along side my language learning process because it really helps the information cement into my mind. Being able to write the building blocks of our character system in IPA is really interesting. The reason why we don’t use IPA is because not many people know it and there is already a standard way that people transliterate their own personal messages so we create resources that go by that standard rather than the official one. It is a compromise between the benefits and disadvantages of each system.
Going back to the original lesson, once you know the verb in its “infinitive” form you learn how to conjugate it 9 others ways, one for each pronoun. I will write down each pronoun with the ending for the verb. My professor indicated to me that the endings for 3rd person pronouns (all except for she) can change as verbs change. The consonant may change but it will still be the same variant of the character (the vowel part).
1st Person:
ane + verb + [ku]
nihne + verb + [næ]
2nd Person:
ante + verb + [kæ]
anti + verb + [ki]
antimu + verb + [kɘmu]
antin + verb + [kɘn]
3rd Person:
wi’itu + verb + [ræ]
yi’iti + verb + [t] (voiced)
wi’itomu + verb + [ru]
wi’iton + verb + [ra]
Moving forward I think I will learn the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs in Ge’ez because Qesis has mentioned that. Additionally, I will learn more conjugations and declensions. We have already begun talking about inflections like prefixes and suffixes. In Ge’ez prefix is [baɘd] and suffix is [mɘlal).
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