Ayn (Pharyngeal A) ዐ

Ayn wrote a pharyngeal consonant in the classical language, the sound behind the Hebrew ayin, the Syriac letter of the same value and the Arabic ayn. The name is the inherited Semitic one, and the correspondence is straightforward.

What is less obvious is that this letter absorbed a second consonant. Proto-Semitic is reconstructed with a voiced velar fricative beside the pharyngeal, a sound Arabic still writes separately as ghayn. Ge'ez merged it into ayn. So did Hebrew, and the merger there can be dated by transcriptions: the place name Gaza and the name Gomorrah both begin with ayin in Hebrew and were rendered into Greek with a g, which only makes sense if the older Hebrew still had the velar sound when those renderings were made.

That gives a rare fixed point. Most Semitic sound changes are dated by comparison alone, and here a transcription into another alphabet catches one in progress. The Ge'ez merger cannot be dated the same way, because no comparable body of early transcription exists, and the atlas records the merger without a date rather than borrowing the Hebrew one.

In the received Ethiopian reading tradition ayn and alf have fallen together as well. Tigrinya still distinguishes them; Amharic does not.

Abiy Tsom, the Great Fast, begins with this letter. It is the Ethiopian Lent, and in the reckoning of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church it runs to fifty-five days rather than the forty of the Western tradition, taking in the preceding week and the week of the Passion.

It is one fast among many. The devout keep Wednesdays and Fridays through most of the year, and there are further fasts before Christmas, before the feast of the Apostles, before the Assumption and at the fast of Nineveh, so that the total number of fasting days in a year is well over half of it. A fast in this tradition means abstaining from all animal products and from eating before a set hour, and it shapes the ordinary Ethiopian kitchen so thoroughly that a large repertory of dishes exists specifically for fasting days.

This is worth stating plainly because a description of a liturgical language can make a tradition sound like a matter of texts. The script carries the calendar, the calendar sets the fasts, and the fasts organise what a household eats for most of the year. The connection between the letter on a page and the food on a plate is short, and it runs through a word that begins with ayn.

The fast before Christmas and the fast of the Apostles have their own lengths, and the fast of Nineveh, kept for three days, is shared with the Syriac tradition, which is one of the visible traces of the long connection between the two churches. A calendar of fasts is a map of a tradition's relationships as much as of its year.