Introductory Grammar of Amharic.

• Author: Kaye, Alan S.
• Position: Brief Reviews of Books

Introductory Grammar of Amharic. By WOLF LESLAU. Porta Linguarum Orientalium, vol. 21. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2000. Pp. xix + 232. DM 98 (paper).

The work under review is the latest addition to Harrassowitz's well-known Porta Linguarum Orientalium series, edited by Werner Diem and Franz Rosenthal, which has given us such fine grammars as Rosenthal's Biblical Aramaic, Heinz Grotzfeld's Syrian Arabic, Wolfdietrich Fischer's Classical Arabic, and Joshua Blau's Biblical Hebrew. The aim is to present to beginning students the grammar of Ambaric, Ethiopia's national language. Thus, it is quite different from the author's encyclopedic Reference Grammar of Amharic (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1995), written for general linguists and specialists in Ethio-Semitic, and much more similar in scope and orientation to Leslau's Ambaric Textbook (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1968). Leslau tells us in the introduction (p. xv) that while a student at the University of Vienna in 1926 he tried to study Amharic using Franz Praetorius' Die amharische Sprache (1879); however, he found that volume unsuitable.

The section on phonology (pp. 1-16) contains all the basics: consonants, vowels, phonological processes, and orthography. The latter is an intricate subject, particularly because of the many inconsistencies in spelling, since (1) [alif.sup.[contains]] and [ayin.sup.[subset]] merged, so that a word such as amat "year" (historically with [ayin.sup.[subset]]--cf. Arabic [am.sup.[subset]]) may be spelled with either, and (2) /h/ may be represented by four different graphemes, and (3) /s/ by two, and (4) /s/ also by two.

Leslau often utilizes a contrastive analysis approach, which English-speaking students will certainly appreciate; e.g., he states that /i/ is like the vowel in English beet, but without the offglide (p. 3). In the section on gemination (p. 13), Leslau asserts that English has gemination in "pen-knife" and "bookcase" (sic). This, however, is a bit misleading, since many varieties of spoken colloquial English degeminate these orthographic geminates, and students may be puzzled if they do not actually perceive the gemination (for details see John Harris, English Sound Structure [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994], 20). On the other hand, gemination in Amharic is phonemic (witness many minimal pairs, such as wat "stew" vs. watt "something out of the ordinary," p. 14). I applaud the author for his thorough yet concise coverage...