49-741: Kobo or Raya Kobo ( Amharic : ራያ ቆቦ ) is a woreda in the Amhara Region of Ethiopia. Located in the northeast corner of the North Wollo Zone , Kobo is bordered on the south by the Logiya River which separates it from Habru and Guba Lafto , on the west by Gidan , on the north by Tigray Region , and on the east by the Afar Region . Towns in Kobo include Gobiye , Kobo and Robit (Kobo Robit). The landscape of this district
98-523: A holy language by the Rastafari religion and is widely used among its followers worldwide. Early Afro-Asiatic populations speaking proto- Semitic , proto- Cushitic and proto- Omotic languages would have diverged by the fourth or fifth millennium BC. Shortly afterwards, the proto-Cushitic and proto-Omotic groups would have settled in the Ethiopian highlands, with the proto-Semitic speakers crossing
147-524: A pidgin as early as the 4th century AD to enable communication between Aksumite soldiers speaking Semitic, Cushitic, and Omotic languages, but this hypothesis has not garnered widespread acceptance. The preservation in Old Amharic of VSO word order and gutturals typical of Semitic languages, Cushitic influences shared with other Ethio-Semitic languages (especially those of the Southern branch), and
196-579: A few years previously led to a decline in the number of farmers migrating to the Afar Region, Djibouti and Sudan . In December 2008, construction on a 2.5 kilometer flood wall was completed, which would protect hundreds of hectares of farmland from frequent flooding by the Dikalla river. Events are listed in a revers-chronological order. During the Tigray War , local residents reported that
245-477: A household, and 52,108 housing units. The majority of the inhabitants practiced Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity , with 82.88% reporting that as their religion, while 16.5% of the population said they were Muslim . The 1994 national census reported a total population for this district of 175,558 in 37,031 households, of whom 87,636 were men and 87,922 were women; 28,706 or 16.35% of its population were urban dwellers. The two largest ethnic groups reported in Kobo were
294-582: A literary medium until relatively recent times. The earliest written example of Tigrinya is a text of local laws found in the district of Logosarda, Debub Region in Southern Eritrea, which dates from the 13th century. In Eritrea, during British administration , the Ministry of Information put out a weekly newspaper in Tigrinya that cost 5 cents and sold 5,000 copies weekly. At the time, it
343-499: A national level. There is no general name for the people who speak Tigrinya. In Eritrea, Tigrinya speakers are officially known as the Bəher-Təgrəñña ( ' nation of Tigrinya speakers ' ) or Tigrinya people . In Ethiopia, a Tigrayan , that is a native of Tigray , who also speaks the Tigrinya language, is referred to in Tigrinya as təgraway (male), təgrawäyti (female), tägaru (plural). Bəher roughly means "nation" in
392-512: A word, the cluster is broken up with the introduction of an epenthetic vowel -ə- , 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) -ə- is introduced before the suffix. For example, Stress is neither contrastive nor particularly salient in Tigrinya. It seems to depend on gemination, but it has apparently not been systematically investigated. Grammatically, Tigrinya
441-405: 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 for those consonants are pronounced with the vowel a, exactly as in the fourth column. These redundant symbols are falling into disuse in Tigrinya and are shown with a dark gray background in
490-751: Is a South Ethio-Semitic language, along with Gurage , Argobba , Harari , and others. Due to the social stratification of the time, the Cushitic Agaw adopted the South Ethio-Semitic language and eventually absorbed the Semitic population. Amharic thus developed with a Cushitic substratum and a Semitic superstratum . The northernmost South Ethio-Semitic speakers, or the proto-Amhara, remained in constant contact with their North Ethio-Semitic neighbors, evidenced by linguistic analysis and oral traditions. A 7th century southward shift of
539-518: Is a typical Ethiopian Semitic (ES) language in most ways: Tigrinya grammar is unique within the Ethiopian Semitic language family in several ways: Tigrinya is written in the Geʽez script , originally developed for Geʽez. The Ethiopic 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
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#1732801819315588-817: Is an Ethiopian Semitic language , which is a subgrouping within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages . It is spoken as a first language by the Amharas , and also serves as a lingua franca for all other populations residing in major cities and towns in Ethiopia . The language serves as the official working language of the Ethiopian federal government, and is also the official or working language of several of Ethiopia's federal regions . As of 2020, it has over 33,700,000 mother-tongue speakers and more than 25,100,000 second language speakers in 2019, making
637-579: Is an abugida , and the graphemes of the Amharic writing system are called fidäl . It is derived from a modification of the Ge'ez script . Each character represents a consonant+vowel sequence, but the basic shape of each character is determined by the consonant, which is modified for the vowel. Some consonant phonemes are written by more than one series of characters: / ʔ / , / s / , / tsʼ / , and / h / (the last one has four distinct letter forms). This
686-663: Is because these fidäl originally represented distinct sounds, but phonological changes merged them. The citation form for each series is the consonant+ ä form, i.e. the first column of the fidäl . The Amharic script is included in Unicode , and glyphs are included in fonts available with major operating systems. As in most other Ethiopian Semitic languages , gemination is contrastive in Amharic. That is, consonant length can distinguish words from one another; for example, alä 'he said', allä 'there is'; yǝmätall 'he hits', yǝmmättall 'he will be hit'. Gemination
735-501: Is called an abugida ( አቡጊዳ ). The graphemes are called fidäl ( ፊደል ), which means "script", "alphabet", "letter", or "character". There is no universally agreed-upon Romanization of Amharic into Latin script . The Amharic examples in the sections below use one system that is common among linguists specializing in Ethiopian Semitic languages. Amharic has been the official working language of Ethiopia, language of
784-474: Is characterized by a broad fertile plain that is separated from the lowlands of the Afar Region by the Zobil mountains, which are over 2000 meters high. In general, the altitude of Kobo ranges from 1100 meters on the plains to slightly more than 3000 meters above sea level along the border with Gidan. Kobo, as well as the other seven rural districts of this Zone, has been grouped amongst the 48 districts identified as
833-525: 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 √b-k-y, there are forms such as ምብካይ /məbkaj/ ( ' to cry ' ) and በኸየ /bɐxɐjɐ/ ( ' he cried ' ), and for the verb meaning ' steal ' , which has the triconsonantal root √s-r-kʼ, there are forms such as ይሰርቁ /jəsɐrkʼu/ ( ' they steal ' ) and ይሰርቕ /jəsɐrrəxʼ/ ( ' he steals ' ). What
882-453: Is especially interesting about these pairs of phones is that they are distinguished in Tigrinya orthography. Because allophones are completely predictable, it is quite unusual for them to be represented with distinct symbols in the written form of a language. 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
931-601: Is in Africa.' ልጁ Lǝǧ-u the boy ተኝቷል täññǝtʷall. asleep is ልጁ ተኝቷል Lǝǧ-u täññǝtʷall. {the boy} {asleep is} 'The boy is asleep.' ( -u is a definite article. Lǝǧ is 'boy'. Lǝǧu is 'the boy') አየሩ Ayyäru the weather ደስ däss pleasant Tigrinya language Tigrinya ( ትግርኛ , Təgrəñña ), sometimes spelled Tigrigna , is an Ethio-Semitic language commonly spoken in Eritrea and in northern Ethiopia 's Tigray Region by
980-464: Is indicated in brackets. Gemination , the doubling of a consonantal sound, is meaningful 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. /kʼɐrrɐbɐ/ , ( ' he brought forth ' ); /kʼɐrɐbɐ/ , ( ' he came closer ' ). All
1029-469: Is mostly heard as the affricate sound [ t͡sʼ ]. The rhotic consonant is realized as a trill when geminated and a tap otherwise. The closed central unrounded vowel ⟨ə⟩ /ɨ/ and mid-central vowel ⟨ä⟩ /ə/ are generally fronted to [ ɪ ] and [ ɛ ], respectively, following palatal consonants , and generally retracted and rounded to [ ʊ ] and [ ɔ ], respectively, following labialized velar consonants . The Amharic script
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#17328018193151078-416: Is not indicated in Amharic orthography, but Amharic readers typically do not find this to be a problem. This property of the writing system is analogous to the vowels of Arabic and Hebrew or the tones of many Bantu languages , which are not normally indicated in writing. Ethiopian novelist Haddis Alemayehu , who was an advocate of Amharic orthography reform , indicated gemination in his novel Love to
1127-793: The Amhara (98.63%), and the Tigrayan (1.26%); all other ethnic groups made up 0.11% of the population. Amharic was spoken as a first language by 98.45%, and Tigrinya was spoken by 1.47%; the remaining 0.08% spoke all other primary languages reported. The majority of the population practiced Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity with 83.2% reported to profess this belief, while 16.72% of the population said they were Muslim . Amharic language Amharic ( / æ m ˈ h ær ɪ k / am- HARR -ik or / ɑː m ˈ h ɑːr ɪ k / ahm- HAR -ik ; native name : አማርኛ , romanized : Amarəñña , IPA: [amarɨɲːa] )
1176-534: The Sinai Peninsula into Asia . A later return movement of peoples from South Arabia would have introduced the Semitic languages to Ethiopia. Based on archaeological evidence, the presence of Semitic speakers in the territory date to some time before 500 BC. Linguistic analysis suggests the presence of Semitic languages in Ethiopia as early as 2000 BC. Levine indicates that by the end of that millennium,
1225-702: The Tigray Defense Forces (TDF) killed 600 civilians in Kobo on 9 September 2021. During Tigray War on August the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF) captured Kobo and the Ethiopian National Defense Force has withdrawn. Both sides have confirmed it. During the Ethiopian Civil War , the town of Gobiye in what is now the Kobo district, was bombed repeatedly by the Ethiopian Air Force : Based on
1274-682: The Tigrinya and Tigrayan peoples respectively. It is also spoken by the global diaspora of these regions. Although it differs markedly from the Geʽez (Classical Ethiopic) language, for instance in having phrasal verbs, and in using a word order that places the main verb last instead of first in the sentence, there is a strong influence of Geʽez on Tigrinya literature, especially with terms relating to Christian life, Biblical names, and so on. Ge'ez, because of its status in Eritrean and Ethiopian culture, and possibly also its simple structure, acted as
1323-462: 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, the orthography is indicated in brackets. 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, the orthography
1372-457: The total number of speakers over 58,800,000. Amharic is the largest, most widely spoken language in Ethiopia, and the second most spoken mother-tongue in Ethiopia (after Oromo ). Amharic is also the second most widely spoken Semitic language in the world (after Arabic ). Amharic is written left-to-right using a system that grew out of the Geʽez script . The segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units
1421-425: The uvular place of articulation (although it is represented in this article as [xʼ] ). All of these possible realizations – velar ejective fricative , uvular ejective fricative , velar ejective affricate and uvular ejective affricate – are cross-linguistically very rare sounds. Since these two sounds are completely conditioned by their environments, they can be considered allophones of /k/ and /kʼ/ . This
1470-659: The 2007 national census conducted by the Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia (CSA), this district has a total population of 221,958, an increase of 26.43% over the 1994 census, of whom 111,605 are men and 110,353 women; 33,142 or 14.93% are urban inhabitants. With an area of 2,001.57 square kilometers, Kobo has a population density of 110.89, which is less than the Zone average of 123.25 persons per square kilometer. A total of 54,466 households were counted in this district, resulting in an average of 4.08 persons to
1519-469: The Ethiopianist tradition they are often transcribed with a dot below the letter. The notation of central vowels in the Ethiopianist tradition is shown in angled brackets. The voiced bilabial plosive /b/ is phonetically realized as a voiced labial approximant [β̞] medially between sonorants in non- geminated form. The fricative ejective / sʼ / is heard as a fricative ejective [ sʼ ], but
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1568-523: The Grave by placing a dot above the characters whose consonants were geminated, but this practice is rare. Punctuation includes the following: One may construct simple Amharic sentences by using a subject and a predicate . Here are a few simple sentences: ኢትዮጵያ ʾItyop̣p̣ya Ethiopia አፍሪካ ʾAfrika Africa ውስጥ wǝsṭ in ናት nat is ኢትዮጵያ አፍሪካ ውስጥ ናት ʾItyop̣p̣ya ʾAfrika wǝsṭ nat {Ethiopia} {Africa} {in} {is} 'Ethiopia
1617-617: The Kobo district is traversed from west to southeast by the Hormat River. The river passes south of Zobil Mountains. The district Agriculture and Rural Development Office announced on 8 April 2007 that it was starting a program to improve the livelihood of district inhabitants, affecting 53,000 farmers. This would use 23.3 million birr of Regional funds to develop basin and degraded mountains, construct all-weather roads and irrigation diversion canals, improve springs as well as various "water harvesting structures". A similar program initiated
1666-583: 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 differ phonetically, lexically, and grammatically. No dialect appears to be accepted as a standard. Even though the most spread and used in, for example books, movies and news is the Asmara dialect. For
1715-449: The alphabet used for writing the Geʽez language. There are 34 basic characters, each of which has seven forms depending on which vowel is to be pronounced in the syllable. There are also 49 "wa" letters, which form compound sounds involving "w." All together, the alphabet has some 280 letters. Until 2020 Amharic was the sole official language of Ethiopia. The 2007 census reported that Amharic
1764-537: The center of gravity of the Kingdom of Aksum and the ensuing integration and Christianization of the proto-Amhara also resulted in a high prevalence of Geʽez sourced lexicon in Amharic. Some time after the 9th century AD, Amharic diverged from its closest relative, Argobba , probably due to religious differences as the Argobba adopted Islam. In 1983, Lionel Bender proposed that Amharic may have been constructed as
1813-457: The consonant and the vowel. In the table below the columns are assigned to the seven vowels of Tigrinya; 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 Ethiopic abugida, this canonical vowel
1862-432: The consonants, with the exception of the pharyngeal and glottal , can be geminated. The velar consonants /k/ and /kʼ/ are pronounced differently when they appear immediately after a vowel and are not geminated . In these circumstances, /k/ is pronounced as a velar fricative . /kʼ/ is pronounced as a fricative, or sometimes as an affricate . This fricative or affricate is more often pronounced further back, in
1911-498: The core inhabitants of Greater Ethiopia would have consisted of dark-skinned agropastoralists speaking Afro-Asiatic languages of the Semitic, Cushitic and Omotic branches. Other scholars such as Messay Kebede and Daniel E. Alemu argue that migration across the Red Sea was defined by reciprocal exchange, if it even occurred at all, and that Ethio-Semitic-speaking ethnic groups should not be characterized as foreign invaders. Amharic
1960-522: The courts, the language of trade and everyday communications and of the military since the late 12th century. The Amhara nobles supported the Zagwe prince Lalibela in his power struggle against his brothers which led him to make Amharic Lessana Negus as well as fill the Amhara nobles in the top positions of his Kingdom. The appellation of "language of the king" ( Ge'ez : ልሳነ ነጋሢ ; "Lǝssanä nägaśi," Amharic : የነጋሢ ቋንቋ "Yä-nägaśi qʷanqʷa") and its use in
2009-504: The ethnic sense of the word in Tigrinya, Tigre , Amharic and Ge'ez. The Jeberti in Eritrea also speak Tigrinya. Tigrinya is the most widely spoken language in Eritrea (see Demographics of Eritrea ), and the fourth most spoken language in Ethiopia after Amharic , Oromo , and Somali . It is also spoken by large immigrant communities around the world, in countries including Sudan , Saudi Arabia , Israel, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Sweden,
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2058-606: The most drought prone and food insecure in the Amhara Region. To combat increasing droughts and improve crop yields, two irrigation projects have been undertaken in this district by the Commission for Sustainable Agriculture and Environmental Rehabilitation in the Amhara Region and the NGO Lutheran World Federation , affecting 302 hectares and benefiting 1,017 households. The northern part of
2107-482: The number of geographically distinct Cushitic languages that have influenced Amharic at different points in time (e.g. Oromo influence beginning in the 16th century) support a natural evolution of Amharic from a Proto-Ethio-Semitic language with considerable Cushitic influences (similar to Gurage, Tigrinya, etc.). The Amharic ejective consonants correspond to the Proto-Semitic " emphatic consonants ." In
2156-486: 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 differs somewhat from the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet . Tigrinya has a fairly typical set of phonemes for an Ethiopian Semitic language. That is, there is a set of ejective consonants and
2205-639: The royal court are otherwise traced to the Amhara Emperor Yekuno Amlak . It is one of the official languages of Ethiopia , together with other regions like Oromo , Somali , Afar , and Tigrinya . Amharic is an Afro-Asiatic language of the Southwest Semitic group and is related to Geʽez , or Ethiopic, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox church; Amharic is written in a slightly modified form of
2254-552: The table. When it is necessary to represent a consonant with no following vowel, the consonant + ə form is used (the symbol in the sixth column). For example, the word ʼǝntay 'what?' is written እንታይ , literally ʼǝ-nǝ-ta-yǝ. 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 ‹ḥ›, ‹s›, and ‹sʼ›. In Eritrea, for ‹s› and ‹sʼ›, at least, one of these has fallen into disuse in Tigrinya and
2303-450: The usual seven-vowel system. Unlike many of the modern Ethiopian Semitic languages, Tigrinya has preserved the two pharyngeal consonants which were apparently part of the ancient Geʽez language and which, along with [ xʼ ] , voiceless velar ejective fricative or voiceless uvular ejective fricative , make it easy to distinguish spoken Tigrinya from related languages such as Amharic, though not from Tigre, which has also maintained
2352-566: Was reported to be the first of its kind. Tigrinya (along with Arabic) was one of Eritrea's official languages during its short-lived federation with Ethiopia . In 1958, it was replaced by the Southern Ethiopic language Amharic prior to its annexation. Upon Eritrea's independence in 1991, Tigrinya retained the status of working language in the country. Eritrea was the only state in the world to officially recognize Tigrinya until 2020, when Ethiopia made changes to recognize Tigrinya on
2401-475: Was spoken by 21.6 million native speakers in Ethiopia. More recent sources state the number of first-language speakers in 2018 as nearly 32 million, with another 25 million second-language speakers in Ethiopia. Additionally, 3 million emigrants outside of Ethiopia speak the language. Most of the Ethiopian Jewish communities in Ethiopia and Israel speak Amharic. Furthermore, Amharic is considered
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