Tigrinya (often written as Tigrigna ; ????: t?gr?ñña, IPA: [t?gr??:a] ( listen)) is an Afroasiatic language of the Semitic branch. It is mainly spoken in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa, with around 6,915,000 total speakers. Tigrinya speakers in Ethiopia (known as Tigrayans in the English language; Tigrawot; feminine Tigr?weyti, male Tigraway, plural Tegaru) number around 4,320,000 individuals, and are centered in the northern Tigray Region. The Tigrinya speakers in Eritrea (Tigrinyas) total roughly 2,540,000, and are concentrated in the southern and central areas. Tigrinya is also spoken by emigrants from these regions, including some Beta Israel.
Tigrinya should not be confused with the related Tigre language. The latter language is spoken by the Tigre, who inhabit the lowland regions of Eritrea. Tigrinya is the primary language spoken in Asmara and surroundings.
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History and literature
Tigrinya differs markedly from the classical Ethiopian Semitic language Ge'ez by having phrasal verbs and using a word-order that places the main verb last instead of first in the sentence. There is a strong Ge'ez influence on Tigrinya literature, especially with terms that relate to Christian life, Biblical names, and so on. Ge'ez, because of its status within Ethiopian culture, acted as a literary medium until relatively recent times. Aside from Ge'ez, Tigrinya itself has had development into the press as the language was incorporated in a ministry newspaper that was published by the British administration of Eritrea. It sold 5000 copies weekly and was at the affordable price of five cents and it was reported to be the first of its kind in the region. However, The earliest written example of Tigrinya is a text of local laws found in Logosarda district, Southern Region, Eritrea and in northern Ethiopia, which dates from the 13th century during the reign of the Zagwe dynasty. However, the phonology of the Tigrinya language along with the morphology still strongly shows the connection to the predecessor language of Ge'ez while the connection also displays Tigriniya's semitic character.
Tigrinya, along with Modern Standard Arabic, is one of Eritrea's two official languages.
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Speakers
There is no generally agreed name for the people who speak Tigrinya. In Ethiopia, a native of Tigray is referred to in Tigrinya as tigr?w?y (male), tigr?weyt? (female), tigr?w?t or tegaru (plural). In Eritrea, Tigrinya speakers are officially known as the Bihér-Tigrigna which means "nation of Tigrinya speakers". Bihér roughly means an ethnic group in Tigrinya, Tigre and Ge'ez (from which Tigrigna and Tigre originate). The Jeberti in Eritrea also speak Tigrinya in addition to Arabic.
According to Ethnologue, there are 6,915,000 total Tigrinya speakers. Of these, approximately 4,320,000 inhabit Ethiopia, with most concentrated in the Tigray region. Tigrinya speakers in Eritrea number around 2,540,000 individuals, and are centered in the southern and central areas. There are also over 10,000 Beta Israel speakers of Tigrinya.
Tigrinya is the fourth most spoken language in Ethiopia after Amharic, Oromo, Somali and the most widely spoken language in Eritrea (see languages). It is also spoken by large immigrant communities around the world, in countries including Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. In Australia, Tigrinya is one of the languages broadcast on public radio via the multicultural Special Broadcasting Service.
Tigrinya dialects are typically split into Northern and Southern sections, which differ phonetically, lexically, and grammatically.
Northern Dialect
- Eritrea (Hamasien, Seraye, Akele Guzay, Anseba)
- Ethiopia (Shire, Aksum, Adwa, Agame)
Southern Dialect
- Ethiopia (Enderta Province, Tembien, Raya, Kilte Awulaelo)
Phonology
For the representation of Tigrinya sounds, this article uses a modification of a system that is common (though not universal) among linguists who work on Ethiopian Semitic languages, but it differs somewhat from the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Consonant phonemes
Tigrinya has a fairly typical set of phonemes for an Ethiopian Semitic language. That is, there is a set of ejective consonants and the usual seven-vowel system. Unlike many of the modern Ethiopian Semitic languages, Tigrinya has preserved the two pharyngeal consonants. Along with [x'], a velar or uvular ejective fricative, these phonological elements make it easy to distinguish spoken Tigrinya from closely related languages such as Amharic. However, it is harder to tell from Tigre, as this language has also maintained the pharyngeal consonants.
The charts below show the phonemes of Tigrinya. The sounds are shown using the same system for representing the sounds as in the rest of the article. When the IPA symbol is different, it is indicated in square brackets. The consonant /v/ appears in parentheses because it occurs only in recent borrowings from European languages.
The fricative sounds [x], [x?], [x'] and [x?'] occur as allophones.
Vowel phonemes
The sounds are shown using the same system for representing the sounds as in the rest of the article. When the IPA symbol is different, it is indicated in square brackets.
Gemination
Gemination, the doubling of a consonantal sound, is phonemic in Tigrinya, i.e. it affects the meaning of words. While gemination plays an important role in the morphology of the Tigrinya verb, it is normally accompanied by other marks. But there is a small number of pairs of words which are only differentiable from each other by gemination, e.g. /k'?rr?b?/, ('he brought forth'); /k'?r?b?/, ('he came closer'). All the consonants, with the exception of the pharyngeal and glottal, can be geminated.
Allophones
The velar consonants /k/ and /k'/ are pronounced differently when they appear immediately after a vowel and are not geminated. In these circumstances, /k/ is pronounced as a velar fricative. /k'/ is pronounced as a fricative, or sometimes as an affricate. This fricative or affricate is more often pronounced further back, in the uvular place of articulation (although it is represented in this article as [x']). All of these possible realizations - velar ejective fricative, uvular ejective fricative, velar ejective affricate and uvular ejective affricate - are cross-linguistically very rare sounds. It is said to be that the differences between the various ejective fricatives are better comprehended when an individual fully understands and has fluency in the Tigrinya language.
Since these two sounds are completely conditioned by their environments, they can be considered allophones of /k/ and /k'/. This is especially clear from verb roots in which one consonant is realized as one or the other allophone depending on what precedes it. For example, for the verb meaning cry, which has the triconsonantal root |bky|, there are forms such as ???? /m?bkaj/ ('to cry') and ??? /b?x?j?/ ('he cried'), and for the verb meaning 'steal', which has the triconsonantal root |srk'|, there are forms such as ???? /j?s?rk'u/ ('they steal') and ???? /j?s?rr?x'/ ('he steals').
Although it is unusual for allophones to be represented with distinct symbols in the written form of a language, these latter phones are distinguished in Tigrinya orthography. Tigriniya's predecessor language of Ge'ez also follows this unique allophonic system.
Many lexical terms in Tigrinya were also borrowed from other languages. It contains hundreds of loanwords from the Indo-European Italian language, which were acquired during the colonial period. An example would be the /h/ sound, which has its origins in Italian. Another example of a borrowed allophone would be the [p] sound in Tigrinya, which is an allophone taken from Italian and Greek. Additional Bernd Heine pinpoints that "a language in which P-sounds occur only in loanwords is Tigrinya, a Semitic language of Ethiopia and Eritrea. According to Woldu (1985), /p/ does not exist in the phonology of Tigrinya, though schooled Tigrinya speakers have little difficulty in pronouncing and perceiving it. It is mostly used for Italian loanwords like "pane" (bread), "polizia" (police), "posta" (post), etc."
Syllables
A Tigrinya syllable may consist of a consonant-vowel or a consonant-vowel-consonant sequence. When three consonants (or one geminated consonant and one simple consonant) come together within a word, the cluster is broken up with the introduction of an epenthetic vowel ?, and when two consonants (or one geminated consonant) would otherwise end a word, the vowel i appears after them, or (when this happens because of the presence of a suffix) ? is introduced before the suffix. For example,
- ??? käbdi 'stomach', ?? l?bbi 'heart'
- -äy 'my', ???? käbdäy 'my stomach', ??? l?bbäy 'my heart'
- -ka 'your (masc.)', ???? käbd?xa 'your (masc.) stomach', ??? l?bb?xa 'your (masc.) heart'
- -n...-n 'and', ???? ??? käbd?n l?bb?n 'stomach and heart'
Stress is neither contrastive nor particularly salient in Tigrinya. It seems to depend on gemination, but it has apparently not been systematically investigated.
Grammar
Typical grammatical features
Grammatically, Tigrinya is a typical Ethiopian Semitic language in most ways:
- A Tigrinya noun is treated as either masculine or feminine. However, most inanimate nouns do not have a fixed gender.
- Tigrinya nouns have plural, as well as singular, forms, though the plural is not obligatory when the linguistic or pragmatic context makes the number clear. As in Tigre and Ge'ez (as well as Arabic), noun plurals may be formed through internal changes ("broken" plural) as well as through the addition of suffixes. For example, ??? färäs 'horse', ???? 'afras 'horses'.
- Adjectives behave in most ways like nouns. Most Tigrinya adjectives, like those in Tigre and Ge'ez, have feminine and plural (both genders) forms. For example, ??? s'?bbux' 'good (m.sg.)', ???? s'?bb?x'ti 'good (f.sg.)', ???? s'?bbux'at 'good (pl.)'
- Within personal pronouns and subject agreement inflections on verbs, gender is distinguished in second person as well as third. For example, ???? täzaräb 'speak! (m.sg.)', ???? täzaräbi 'speak (f.sg.)'.
- Possessive adjectives take the form of noun suffixes: ?? gäza 'house', ??? gäza-y 'my house', ??? gäza-xi 'your (f.sg.) house'.
- Verbs are based on consonantal roots, most consisting of three consonants: {sbr} 'break', ??? säbärä 'he broke', ???? y?säbb?r 'he breaks', ???? m?sbar 'to break'.
- Within the tense system there is a basic distinction between the perfective form, conjugated with suffixes and denoting the past, and the imperfective form, conjugated with prefixes and in some cases suffixes, and denoting the present or future: ??? säbär-u 'they broke', ???? y?-säbr-u 'they break'.
- As in Ge'ez and Amharic, there is also a separate "gerundive" form of the verb, conjugated with suffixes and used to link verbs within a sentence: ???? ???? gädifka täzaräb 'stop (that) and speak (m.sg.)'.
- Verbs also have a separate jussive/imperative form, similar to the imperfective: ???? y?-sbär-u 'let them break'.
- Through the addition of derivational morphology (internal changes to verb stems and/or prefixes), verbs may be made passive, reflexive, causative, frequentative, reciprocal, or reciprocal causative: ??? fälät'-u 'they knew', ???? tä-fält'-u 'they were known', ???? 'a-fält'-u 'they caused to know (they introduced)', ???? tä-falät'-u 'they knew each other', ???? 'a-f-falät'-u 'they caused to know each other'.
- Verbs may take direct object and prepositional pronoun suffixes: ???? fälät'ä-nni 'he knew me', ????? fälät'ä-lläy 'he knew for me'.
- Negation is expressed through the prefix ay- and, in independent clauses, the suffix -n: ?????? ay-fälät'ä-n 'he didn't know'.
- The copula and the verb of existence in the present are irregular: ?? 'allo 'there is, he exists', ?? ?yyu 'he is', ??? or ???? yällän or yälbon 'there isn't, he doesn't exist', ????? ayk?änän 'he isn't', ??? näbärä 'he existed, he was, there was', ???? y?-xäww?n 'he will be', ???? y?-näbb?r 'he will exist, there will be'.
- The verb of existence together with object suffixes for the possessor expresses possession ('have') and obligation ('must'): ??? 'allo-nni 'I have, I must' (lit. 'there is (to) me').
- Relative clauses are expressed by a prefix attached to the verb: ???? z?-fälät'ä 'who knew'
- Cleft sentences, with relative clauses normally following the copula, are very common: ?? ?? ???? män ?yyu z?-fälät'ä 'who knew?' (lit. 'who is he who knew?').
- There is an accusative marker used on definite direct objects. In Tigrinya this is the prefix n?-. For example, ??? ????? ???? ?ag?äs n?'almaz räxibuwwa 'Hagos met Almaz'.
- As in other modern ES languages, the default word order in clauses is subject-object-verb, and noun modifiers usually (though not always in Tigrinya) precede their head nouns.
Innovations
Tigrinya grammar is unique among the Ethiopian Semitic languages in several ways:
- For second person pronouns, there is a separate vocative form, used to get a person's attention: ??? n?ss?xa 'you (m.sg.)', ?? 'atta 'you! (m.sg.)'.
- There is a definite article, related (as in English) to the demonstrative adjective meaning 'that': ?? ?? '?ta g?al 'the girl'.
- The gerundive form is used for past tense, as well as for the linking function as in Ge'ez and Amharic: ???? täzaribu '(he) speaking, he spoke'.
- Yes-no questions are marked by the particle ? do following the questioned word: ????? ??? ?aftäydo r?'ixi 'did you (f.sg.) see my sister?'.
- The negative circumfix ay- -n may mark nouns, pronouns, and adjectives as well as verbs: ????? ay-'anä-n 'not me', ?????? ay'ab?y-?n 'not big'
- Tigrinya has an unusually complex tense-aspect-mood system, with many nuances achieved using combinations of the three basic aspectual forms (perfect, imperfect, gerundive) and various auxiliary verbs including the copula (?? ?yyu, etc.), the verb of existence (?? 'allo, etc.), and the verbs ??? näbärä 'exist, live', ?? konä 'become', ??? s'än?e 'stay'.
- Tigrinya has compound prepositions corresponding to the preposition-postposition compounds found in Amharic: ?? ??? ??? ab l?'li 'arat 'on (top of) the bed', ?? ??? ??? ab t??ti 'arat 'under the bed'
- Unlike most ES languages, Tigrinya has only one set of applicative suffixes, used both for the dative and benefactive and for locative and adversative senses: ????? täx'ämmit'a-llu 'she sat down for him' or 'she sat down on it' or 'she sat down to his detriment'.
Writing system
Tigrinya is written in the Ge'ez script (Ethiopic script), which was originally developed for the Ge'ez language. The Ge'ez script is an abugida. Each symbol represents a consonant+vowel syllable, and the symbols are organized in groups of similar symbols on the basis of both the consonant and the vowel. In the table below the columns are assigned to the seven vowels of Tigrinya (and Ge'ez); they appear in the traditional order. The rows are assigned to the consonants, again in the traditional order.
For each consonant in an abugida, there is an unmarked symbol representing that consonant followed by a canonical or inherent vowel. For the Ge'ez abugida, this canonical vowel is ä, the first column in the table. However, since the pharyngeal and glottal consonants of Tigrinya (and other Ethiopian Semitic languages) cannot be followed by this vowel, the symbols in the first column in the rows for those consonants are pronounced with the vowel a, exactly as in the fourth row. These redundant symbols are falling into disuse in Tigrinya and are shown with a dark gray background in the table. When it is necessary to represent a consonant with no following vowel, the consonant+? form is used (the symbol in the sixth column). For example, the word '?ntay 'what?' is written ????, literally '?-n?-ta-y?.
Since some of the distinctions that were apparently made in Ge'ez have been lost in Tigrinya, there are two rows of symbols each for the consonants /?/, /s/, and /s'/. In Eritrea, for /s/ and /s'/, at least, one of these has fallen into disuse in Tigrinya and is now considered old-fashioned. These less-used series are shown with a dark gray background in the chart.
The orthography does not mark gemination, so the pair of words k'ärräbä 'he approached', k'äräbä 'he was near' are both written ???. Since such minimal pairs are very rare, this presents no problem to readers of the language.
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