For this blog post, I want to share the podcast questions my language partner gave me along with my reflection on them. We both prepared questions for each other to speak on during the podcast. I thought they were good reflection questions so I also wanted to write my thoughts to gather them on my post for this week.
Language Partner Podcast questions:
What made you first interested in linguistics and philology?
How have your initial interests and motivations changed or developed in your studies?
What languages have you studied and which do you have more of an interest in?
How do you plan to continue with your future studies?
What other projects are you working on related to
Lidia’s Questions & Answers:
How does it feel for you, as an Eritrean, to study Ge’ez?
I don’t know, I never really considered it in that sense of feeding my personal identity as an Eritrean but rather a Tewahdo Christian. I guess I always associated Ge’ez as something different from anything in this world. Even though I contest it intellectually, I still feel like it is unique and taps into something so beautiful and not yet formed in my brain, sometimes something that feels out of reach. Tigrigna being a Semitic language as well has helped me probably more than I know, though. It definitely has made studying Ge’ez a little more manageable because I often notice cognates and such.
People often consider Ge’ez to be a “dead” language, but you and I worked on composition, can we challenge this label (consider qine etc.)?
Ge’ez is very much alive in the Tewahdo Church and I think scholars do continue to write qine, arkies, compositions, I don’t know how much of it is published though. I see that it is documented, but overall I guess since more efforts are going into translations than compositions the label is probably fitting. What do you think about this label?
How did you find the spectrum of composing new texts, working with more recent ones, and working from a 600 year old manuscript?
I found it really fascinating and consider myself very lucky to have an opportunity to work with such texts. Doing a wide range of things has helped me detect different styles more. More prominently the difference between poetry and narrative...which I really didn’t think were that different until being exposed to both right after one another here. Obviously, I have a ways to go but it’s really interesting to me when you point out certain stylistic items. It helps draw the bigger picture, and the works in context.
During Holy Week, I was listening to a lot more Ge’ez than I was used to. Like several hours a day and not in melody, I think all of this has helped me to at least be able to sit through these services and at the most be able to understand fully what is being read. At one point I fell asleep during a reading and actually had a dream in Ge’ez.
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