Reference Grammar of Amharic.

• Author: Hudson, Grover

By WOLF LESLAU. Wiesbaden: OTTO HARRASSOWITZ, 1995. Pp. xlv + 1044. DM 228.

This thorough and detailed grammar of Amharic, representing over thirty years of research, supplants all previous such works and so represents a significant event in the modern history of Amharic. It is yet another significant event in the career of Wolf Leslau (now in his ninety-first year), doyen of Ethiopian studies.

Amharic is an important world language of perhaps fifteen million speakers, somewhat fewer in Africa than Arabic, Swahili, Hausa, and Oromo. It is the second most populous Semitic language, after Arabic, and the lingua franca and constitutionally recognized national language of Ethiopia. Besides its status as an important national language and lingua franca of the Horn of Africa as well as Ethiopia, Amharic deserves attention as the most studied and best attested of the Ethiopian Semitic languages and, as such, is the best representative of this historically and typologically interesting group. With the appearance of this grammar, modern Amharic is perhaps now as accessible to comparative study as its much more famous cousins, modern Arabic and Hebrew, and perhaps more accessible than any other African language, including Swahili, for which I doubt there exists a grammar as thorough as this one.

The traditional territory of the Amharas is the mountainous north-central part of Ethiopia consisting of the regions of Begemder (Gondar region); western Wello, Gojjam, and Menz. Today, however, perhaps the majority of town and city-dwelling Ethiopians, except in largely Tigrinya-speaking Tigre province, are at least second-language speakers of Amharic. Despite the recent independence of Eritrea, one still often hears Amharic regularly in the streets of Asmara, and the influence of Amharic extends into the Ethiopian border regions of Somalia, Sudan, and Kenya. (Recently in Chicago I had a passable conversation in Amharic with a taxi driver from Somalia who had visited Ethiopia only once.) Except in the core Amhara areas of Shoa, Gojjam, and Begemder, Amharic speakers in Ethiopia are often bilingual, and probably most have another Ethiopian language as their native language.

There are recognizable regional varieties or dialects of Amharic: of Shoa, Begcinder, Gojjam, and Menz-Wello, but the differences among them are minor, mainly concerning pronunciation. Not just the political capital, Addis Ababa is nowadays the focus of Ethiopian economic and social life, and its Amharic has become the prestige variety.

There are Amharic manuscripts from the fourteenth century, and publication in Amharic has increased steadily since the beginning of this century. There was a flourishing of Amharic creative writing in the immediate post-revolutionary period after 1975, and Amharic publications today include writings of all sorts: poetry, newspapers, literary and news magazines...