Speaking the Language.

I believe I have already mentioned that the national language of Ethiopia was Amharic, which is the language spoken by one of the larger ethnic groups, the Amhara. I say “was” because, while Amharic was and still is still the working language of the national government, there has been an effort in the past decades to allow all ethnic groups to use their mother tongues in regional government business and in primary education. English was (and still is) the medium of instruction in secondary schools and universities, which means that any Ethiopian who had some secondary education could speak at least a little English, in theory. In practice, it was helpful for us, as guests in their country, to learn to communicate in the local language. So in June of 1995, we enrolled full-time in language school.

Before we went to Ethiopia, we had splurged on a cassette tape-based language learning course, the same one the State Department developed to teach Amharic to American diplomats. And when I say we splurged – that course cost the equivalent of a month’s rent, which was a lot of money to us, back in our grad student days. Unfortunately, while the course was designed to help us gain fluency, it didn’t help at all with literacy – which is to say that we learned some vocabulary and a few useful phrases but we didn’t learn how to read.

Also, a little aside here: one of the cassette tape lessons taught us the specific phrase “feet-le-feet” which literally means “face-to-face”. Here it is, used in an actual sentence from the lesson: “The American Embassy is ‘feet-le-feet’ (face-to-face with or right across from) the train station.” Now, there’s only one American Embassy in the whole country of Ethiopia – the one in Addis Abeba. And there’s only one train station in Addis Abeba (at least, there was only one before the days of light rail). And the American Embassy was most definitely NOT feet-le-feet with the train station! To this day I don’t know why they couldn’t have created a phrase that both demonstrated proper usage and reflected the actual geography of the country. For your information, the American Embassy is ‘feet-le-feet’ with the university, and the train station is ‘feet-le-feet’ with the stadium. For heaven’s sake.

Anyway, the challenge of Amharic is that it doesn’t use a western alphabet. It’s a Semitic language closely related to Arabic and Hebrew, and it uses an ancient and unique script in which each character is actually a syllable, usually a consonant plus a vowel sound. So my name, Sara, uses two characters instead of four, equivalent to the syllables “sa” + “ra”. Here’s what it looks like written down (although I personally would use the other “sa”):

ሳራ

The collection of syllabic characters is known as the “fidel” (pronounced exactly like Fidel Castro) -- a total of 242 unique symbols, all of which we learned to recognize and to write in the first week of language school. Here’s what the whole thing looks like:

And I have to say, learning to read in Amharic was pretty rewarding from the first moment. We never became super-fluent but it was a thrill to be able to read basic words like “hotel” or “taxi”, which were particularly easy because they were transliterated directly from English to Amharic.

More about language school next time.