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A grammatical sketch of Khamtanga—I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

D. L. Appleyard
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Extract

It is now a century since the publication of Reinisch’s Chamirsprache, which has remained irtually the only source of information we have on this Agaw lanhuage to date. As a result of his acquaintance with a native speaker from Soqota(Säk’wät ’a), whist working in Massawa on his study of Bilin, the northernmost agaw language, Reinisch was able to collect enough information to mproduce a reasonable descripiton of the language. He himself neer had the opporunity to work on chamir in its home environment and was forced to curtail his studies of the language when his informant was obliged to leave Massawa. After the publication of Die Chamirsprache in 1884, no new information on the language until Conti Rossini’s brief description of Khamta was published in 1904, twenty years later. The dialect he recorded is material, though scanty, contains a number of very interesting features, both phonemis and morphological: for example, he cites the only known instance of prefix conjugating erds in Agaw outside Awngi, the southernmost and most divergent mermber of the group. Unfortunately his morphological description is all too cursory and does not permit a proper analysis of this highly idiosyncratic dialect. It may well be that Conti Rossini’s Khamta should be regarded as a separate language from Reinisch’ Chamie, or the Khamtanga dialect presented here. I shall have occasion to return briefly to this question below.

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Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , June 1987 , pp. 241 - 266
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1987

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References

1 Reinisch's Die Chamirsprache in Abessinien, Wien, 1884, the first and in ways still the most complete description of the language, was preceded by a number of brief notes and Word-lists, notably Salt, 1814, Bake. 1845, and d’Abbadie, 1841 and 1872. The first record of Khamtanga, however, is owed to the traeller James Bruce who commissioned a translation of the song of solomon in ‘Tcherecth Agow’, part of which be publisher along with texts in various other Ethiopian languages.The text, however, is difficult to assess and is unfortunately virtually worthless for any serious linguistic analysis.

2 A brief accountof Renisch's work and his importance to the study of Agaw was given by the author at the Internationales Leo Renisch-Symposium, held the patronage of the österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna in October 1982, the proceedings of which are awaiting publication.

3 Conti, Rossini, ‘Appunti sulla lingua Khamta dell’ Averghelle”, Giornale della Società Asiatica Italiana, 17, 1904, 183–.Google Scholar

4 Verbal inflexion in Cushitic languages generally follows the patterm of root + suffixed markers of person, tense, mood, ect. A number of languages, notably Afar, Saho, Somali, Rendille, and others, also posses verbs which mark person by prefixes, hence ‘prefix conjugating’ verbs, This latter system is ostensibly the older, inherited Afro-asiatic pattern, still prevalent for example in Semitic languages.

5 In particulay, ‘Die Hilfselmente der Konjugation in den Kuschitischen Sprachen’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 107, 1957, 7–30.Google Scholar

6 Bender, , ‘The languages of Ethiopia’, Anthropoligical Linguistics, 13.5 1971, 165–282, the ‘Xamta’ word-list appears as no. 99 on p. 279 and contains a number of errors and inconsistencies of transcription. For a review of the whole monograph see Sasse 1973.Google Scholar

7 For recent treatises on Bilin see Palmer, 1957, 1958, 1960, 1965, and 1966; for Awngi see Hetzron, 1969 and 1978, for Kemant see Appleyard, 1975.

8 I should to thank Dr. James Mccann of Boston University, African Studies Center, for originally drawing my attention to these.

9 An extension to my stay in Ethiopia in 1983 in order to carry out the field-work behing this grammatical sketch was made possibly by a generous award from the Governing Body of the School of Oriental and African Studies, to whom I am most grateful. I should like to recordmy gratitude to members of staff of the Institute of Language Studies, Addis Ababa University, who assisted my initial search for informations in Addis Ababa and Nazret.

10 See the accompanying map for these and other places. Information for the southerly extent of the Khamtanga speech area is drawn from the map in Kase Kälkay's unpublished B.A. thesis ‘Morphological structure of nouns and nominals in Wag Säqota Agaw’, Addis Ababa, 1972 E. C. (in Amharic).

11 I obtained no firsthand information on the dialect of Säk'ät'a, but subsequent conversation with Kase Kälkay (see n. 10) brought to light a number of small difference.

12 The morphological notes supplied by Conti Rossini are too scanty to make any serious judgement, but what he does record is in places alarmingly different from Reinisch's and my material; compare the personal pronouns and the traces of prefix conjugating verbs, in particular.

13 Tubiana, , ‘Note sur la distribution géographique des dialectes agaw’, Cahiers de i' Afrique et de I' Asie 5 (Mer Rouge, Afrique Orientale), 1957, 297–306; see in particular pp.299 and 301.Google Scholar

14 Simoons, , Northwest Ethiopia, peoples and economy, Madison, 1960; See in particular 22 and 42–3.Google Scholar

15 See Tubiana, op. cit., 303 ff.

16 ibid.‥.:the use of Agaw in aliturgical context is supported by a collection of prayers in Gèez with occasional passages in Agaw in Ethiopic script, a copy of which is in the author' The kunfail people and which was kindly made available by the Rev. R. cowley

17 Our only information to date on Kunfail comes from the short article ‘Then Kunfail people and their languages’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies, 9, 1971, by R. W. Cowley with Tequebba Birru and Zena Adal.Google Scholar

18 SeeConti, Rossini, Racconti e canti bileni, Actes du XIVe Congré International des Orientalistes, 2, paris, 1907, 331–43. in particular pp. 332ff., for a discussion of this legend.Google Scholar

19 SeeHertzron, , ‘The nominal system of Awngi(soughern Agaw)’, BSOAS, XLI, 1, 1978, 122.Google Scholar

20 See Appleyard, 1975, 319.

21 Note that Reinisch does not make this distinction, but records zin as meaning both ‘brother’ and ‘sister’. Kinship terms normally only appear in composition with a prefixed pronominal possessive, hence the hypen;-sin, etc.

22 The same distribution of the plural suffix-än occours in Kemant; see Appleyard, 1975, 323.

23 For a discussion on consonantal ablaut as plural marking device in Agaw see especially Zaborski 1976. Awngi apears to have greatly simplified the morphology of noun plurals, the commonest device there being the suffix -Ka; See Hetzron, 1978. 124.

24 The appaent anomaly of the alteration between θ and k' can be explained as conforming with the other pattern when it is seen that a medical Proto-agaw *x usually is lost in Khamatanga. The pair θ: K'l thus corresponds directly to the Bilian ablaut pair x:k. The same origin would seem to lie behind the pair y: k/k'.

25 See Hetzron, 1978, 127.

26 See Reinisch, 1884, §230, p. 114.

27 The few instances of plural possessives in -ä occour only indefinite nouns and in indefinite noun pharses. Otherwise the -z ending must be used; ik'ä nint’ ‘people's houses’, but ik'-i-z-ik’"nint ‘lthe houses of the people, where -ik’" is the plural concord suffix in a agreement with the head noun nint’.

28 The postposition gw” does not occour its own, however, it would appear to be reduced form of the noun recordedby Reinisch as gebā, meaning ‘side’.

29 See Appleyard, 1975, 325–6.

30 See part II of this paper, Section 4. 2. 5. I.

31 Bilin still preserves a category of feminine noun marked by the suffix -i: gidiň ‘dog’ -gidiňi ‘bitch’; see Palmer, 1958, 377.

32 Oblique function only, not possessive.

33 The same substituion of the original Agaw form for ‘forty’ also occours in Kemant where Amharic arba is used. The expected Khamtanga form sizārniň was supplied by one informant as typical of children's and women's speech; Reinisch records only sizerihen. [The second part of ‘A grammatical sketch of Khamtanga’, consisting of a description of the verb and an outline vocabulary, will appear in BSO As, l, 3, 1987].