User:MikeGasser/draft4
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| Silt'e ስልጥኘ |
||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Ethiopia | |
| Total speakers: | 827,764 (1998 census) | |
| Language family: | Afro-Asiatic Semitic South Semitic Ethiopian Semitic South Transverse East Gurage Silt'e |
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | sem | |
| ISO 639-3: | xst | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Silt'e (ስልጥኘ [silt'iɲɲǝ] or የስልጤ አፍ [yǝsilt'e af]) is a Semitic language spoken in central Ethiopia, mainly within the Silt'e zone in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region, and by speakers of the language who have settled in Ethiopian cities, especially Addis Ababa.
Contents |
[edit] Speakers
Dialects of the language include Azarnat, Enneqor (Inneqor), Ulbarag (Urbareg) and Wolane.
[edit] Sounds and orthography
[edit] Consonants and vowels
Silt'e has a fairly typical set of consonants for an Ethiopian Semitic language. There is the usual set of ejective consonants. However, the set of vowels differs considerably from the typical set of seven vowels in languages such as Amharic, Tigrinya, and Ge'ez. Silt'e has the set of five short and five long vowels that is typical of the nearby Eastern Cushitic languages, which may be the origin of the Silt'e system. There is considerable allophonic variation within the vowels, especially for /a/.
The charts below show the phonemes of Silt'e. For the representation of Silt'e 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. When the IPA symbol is different, it is indicated in brackets in the charts.
| Bilabial/ Labiodental |
Dental | Palato-alveolar/ Palatal |
Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stops | Voiceless | (p) | t | k | ||
| Voiced | b | d | g | |||
| Ejective | p' | t' | k' | |||
| Affricates | Voiceless | č [ʧ] | ||||
| Voiced | ǧ [ʤ] | |||||
| Ejective | č' [ʧ'] | |||||
| Fricatives | Voiceless | f | s | š [ʃ] | x | h |
| Voiced | [v] | z | ž [ʒ] | |||
| Nasals | m | n | ñ [ɲ] | |||
| Approximants | w | l | y [j] | |||
| Flap/Trill | ||||||
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i, ii [i] | u, uu [u] | |
| Mid | e, ee [e] | a [ǝ] | o, oo [o] |
| Low | aa [a] |
[edit] Allophones
[edit] Morphophonology
[edit] Orthography
Since at least the 1980s, Silt'e has been written in the Ge'ez, or Ethiopic, writing system, originally developed for the now-extinct Ge'ez language. This system makes distinctions among seven vowels, rather than ten. In written Silt'e, the Ethiopic vowels (in their traditional order) are mapped onto the Silt'e vowels as follows: ä a u u, uu i ii a aa e e, ee ǝ i o o, oo
