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:
More
about language school next time.
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