ETHIOPIAN Manual Alphabet

[eyasu tamene]

Dearest Val, Nemery and all,
 
Thanks for your appreciationalthough I didn't involve in the making of script/orthography of Ethioppian Manual Alphabet...Smile.
 
With in the alphabet there are homophones i.e. sounds same in pronounciation but different in written form like 
                    2, 3, 13  pronounced as "HA" as in HARD
                    5 and 7  pronounced as  'Sä" as in SURPRISE
              13 and 21 pronounced as "a"  as in Absolute
              31 and 32  a sound not found in English - a combination of 't' and 's' phonetically as s' 

Thus there are distinct sounds of 33-5= 28. 
 
Infact the handshpes looks like the written letters. Then it moves in different way to show the vowels. The vowels and consonants are uttered together. There are 7 vowels which can't be separable from the consonants, different from the English. With regard to the writing system the Ethiopian uses the Sabian script and the system is mentioned by Nancy as in 
"The Ethiopian writing system is called an abugida rather than an alphabet. Here is a definition of an abugida: "A phonographic writing system in which vowels are typically written as diacritics on consonants and one vowel is not written: e.g. scripts of India, Ethiopic" (from "Writing Systems: a Linguistic Approach", by Henry Rogers)."

 

Hoping to get your feedback

Eyasu










__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/sw-l/attachments/20050711/e748d0f7/attachment.htm>