This past week I had my first session with my language partner. Before starting with Qesis Moges, I was able to begin my reading schedule in my dual Amharic and Ge’ez book and exposure to listening content. I also found out that I will be teaching basics of Amharic to my Sunday school class in the new curriculum for the Ge’ez new year. After speaking with Qesis, we decided to focus more on Ge’ez and utilize Amharic to teach the material and be a medium between Ge’ez and English.
In our first lesson, we went over cognates between Ge’ez, Amharic, and Tigrigna and basic parts of speech (pronouns, verbs, adjectives and nouns). A fun fact that I learned is that Ge’ez also has some borrowed words (loan words) from Greek like the words for deacon, bishop (Papas), and episcopal. We talked over all about how verbs are conjugated. Then we dove deeper into pronouns. Ge’ez has 10 pronouns:
1st Person:
ane: I (singular, neutral)
nihne: we (plural, neutral)
2nd Person:
ante: you (singular, masculine)
anti: you (singular, feminine)
antimu: you all (plural, masculine, or neutral)
antin: you all (plural, feminine)
3rd Person:
wi’itu: he
yi’iti: she
wi’itomu: they (masculine or neutral)
wi’iton: they (feminine)
Each pronoun has a different conjugation that is gender and plurality specific which is different from English. Though I haven’t formally learned this yet, I know that the endings of these pronouns transfer to different things. Meaning, the -omu, -on, -ti, -te, -ne, etc are morphemes.
I am excited to learn how to change the general knowledge that I use to gage what different texts are saying into organized knowledge so my reading is not guess work. Learning these structured mechanisms is really interesting and I can apply them almost immediately.
So far, I think a really good way for me to get Ge’ez exposure is simply attending church services and listening to the Ge’ez scriptures being read and hymns being sung. For different Church holidays, I have begun writing down hymns and translating them.
I appreciate that my language partner has ample knowledge about these texts and services because not only is the language important but the culture and contexts of the hymns. They each have a story behind them that can enhance the meaning of each word. For example, the verb berhe, which means to light up, may mean something way more significant if the person doing the action is God. The words can have double or triple meaning with different contexts because essentially the majority of examples I will look at are pieces of poetry not prose.
The prose that I will be looking at is biographical or historical. I presume that it will be more straightforward than the poetry. Like I said, I will primarily be using a dual Amharic and Ge’ez book called the Miracles of St Mary.
Next week we will go over more vocabulary that Qesis has prepared for me that will be helpful for my general study.
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