Apologia pro transcriptione sua: A Mode of Transcribing Amharic for the Computer Age

Apologia pro transcriptione sua A Mode of Transcribing Amharic for the Computer Age Reidulf K. Molvaer Folkehelsa, National Institute of Public Health, Oslo Amharic has been transcribed with Latin letters in a number of ways, all of them workable in various ways, but not very suitable for the modern word processor. In non-specialist publications it is quite common to use the alphabet of the language of the writer with approximate phonetic values (English, French, German, Italian, etc.), and for most people, this is all they need. However, scholars have devised two mainly phonetic alphabets that represent Amharic pronunciation more precisely. Most scholars seem to use vowel symbols that have more or less (but never fully equivalent) "Continental" values (one alternative including a), but usually with an extra symbol: the inverted e (d) or e with a wedge over it, and some use a, e and perhaps i with a line over them. Thus, the seven Amharic vowel orders may be written ä, u, i, a, e, 5, o, or a, u, i or i with a line over it, a with a line over it, e or e with a line over it, d or e or e with a wedge over it, o. Some use Greek epsilon (e) for the first order vowel, and/or e for the fifth order. The consonants have nearly (but of course never exactly) English values, but a wedge is used above s, c, c, ? and z, and in one case also over g (for the sy/sh, ch, çh, ñ/ny, zy/zh and; sounds). Of these I have only 5' (and ñ with a tilde instead of a wedge) on my computer. Further, dots are generally placed under the glottal consonants (also called "explosives" or "ejectives"), except, commonly, q, which represents glottal k (i.e., k). Individual inventiveness may also come into the picture, such as dg for;', gn for ñ/ny, etc. One of these alphabets (including the first row of vowel signs above) seems to be preferred by most scholars, but a modification of it, devised by® Northeast African Studies (ISSN 0740-9133) Vol. 3, No. 3 (New Series) 1996, pp. 59-6759 60 ReidulfK. Molvaer Stephen Wright (including most of the other alternatives), is frequently used by librarians and also by many scholars. The two conventional phonetic alphabets used in scholarly publications were devised for and are manageable with a typewriter, except inverted e (d) and the wedge, which some get added to their typewriters and others add by hand. The latter procedure may be rather tiresome, as particularly the sixth order vowel is so very common. We are now in the computer age, where more and more people find it very cumbersome to use these phonetic alphabets. It is not possible to place dots under consonants, nor to place wedges or lines over letters (although s is usually found among available "symbols", and one can use the tilde instead of the wedge to write n). It is for this and other reasons (see below) that an urgent need to devise a phonetic alphabet for transcribing Amharic, adapted for the word processor or personal computer and equally easy to use with a typewriter, is needed. I have been working with this problem from the middle of the 1980s, when word processors were introduced into the UN system and I was given the task of, inter alia, teaching medical anthropology to Ethiopians and where I needed to refer to old traditional "medical" texts with the transcription of many words (names of herbs, spirits, diseases with no English name, etc.), at the same time as I on my own was working on a translation of the chronicle of Lijj (Lij, Lsjj, Lôj, Lejj, Lej, Lidg, Ledg, Ligg, Lig, Legg, Leg—the last four with wedges over the g's) Ïyasu/Iyasu/Eyasu and Empress Zewd'itu/Zewditu/Zawditu/Zäwditu/ Zauditu, collecting biographies of authors (with lots of names and book-titles to transcribe), and gathering materials for an anthropological study. As I experimented on the computer, I soon left the traditional mode I had used in Tradition and Change in Ethiopia, and for many years varied the transcription from time to time...