Geez - Definition and Overview

The Ge'ez language (or Gi'iz language) is an ancient language that developed in the Ethiopian Highlands of the Horn of Africa as the language of the peasantry. It later became the language of the Ethiopian imperial court and of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church.

Today Ge'ez remains the main language used in the worship services of the Ethiopian (and Eritrean) Orthodox Church, though Amharic (the main lingua franca of modern Ethiopia) has also been introduced in a few churches. The Ge'ez writing system, (or 'Fidel' as it is known in Ethiopia), forms the basis for most scripts used for writing the various languages of Ethiopia.

Ge'ez is also still in use by the Beta Israel Jewish community of Ethiopia for their scriptures and liturgy.

The language has been assigned the ISO 639 code gez and the SIL code GEE.

History

The Ge'ez alphabet and the language itself is considered to have evolved under the influence of southern-Arabic colonies from first millennium B.C. The first inscriptions in Ge'ez are dated to the 4th century A.D, although some scientists assume that this language was invented around the 1st or 2nd century. It is generally considered a South Semitic language. It has replaced the Sabey language and alphabet (although that was still used up to around 8th century A.D). Ge'ez was in turn replaced around 13th century A.D. by the Amharic language in the south and the Tigrigna language in the north. The Tigre language also uses the Ge'ez alphabet and is more closely related to Ge'ez then either Amharic or Tigrigna.

Ge'ez writing system

The word Ge'ez is also applied to the abugida which is used to write the language. The Amharic in Ethiopia and Tigrigna in Eritrea and Ethiopia use modified forms of the Ge'ez abugida. Other languages in the Horn of Africa were also historically written using Ge'ez, such as Oromo language and Somali, but these have generally migrated to Latin-based orthographies.

Ge'ez (or "Ethiopic") has been assigned Unicode codepoints U+1200 – U+137F (decimal 4608–4991):

Reference

David Diringer. The Alphabet, A Key To The History of Mankind. 1968.

See also

• Axumite Kingdom

External links

• Ethnologue report for Ge'ez (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=GEE).
• A chart (http://syllabary.sourceforge.net/Ethiopic/Geez.html) correlating IPA values to the Ge'ez syllabary symbols.
• A chart (http://www.ancientscripts.com/ethiopic.html) of the Ge'ez syllabary.
• Unicode assignments (http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/ethiopic.html) for Ethiopic characters.
• Overview  (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ethiopic.htm) of the language.