Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme

Switch Atlas

The Inner World

The Civil World

The Natural World

Alphabet Letters

Dant (Da) ደ

Ge'ez Letters

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Origin Descends from the Ancient South Arabian script; the vocalised seven-order form appears on Aksumite inscriptions of the fourth century CE

Dant is the nineteenth letter of the Ge'ez fidel and writes a plain d. Ge'ez is chanted rather than merely read in the churches that use it, and the chant has its own notation, a system of signs written above the text which cue melodic formulas known to the trained cantor. That notation sits on top of the fidel and is a separate layer of the written page, so a liturgical manuscript carries at least two systems of marks at once. Learning to read the letters is only the first stage of the long training a debtera or cantor undertakes.

Facts
Transmission
Manuscript Tradition
Ge'ez scripture and liturgical books are copied by hand on parchment and bound between wooden boards, a practice that has continued without interruption 3Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity
Disputed
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Why the script was vocalised in the fourth century CE, after centuries of writing consonants alone, is argued and not settled 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script
The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) reviews the Aksumite inscriptions that first show Ge'ez written with vocalisation, a fourth-century CE innovation that is not in dispute, and canvasses three explanations for why it happened then: an internal development inside the Aksumite royal chancery seeking a more precise script for administration; a response to the newly Christian court's need for scripture translated and taught with unambiguous vowels after Aksum's conversion under King Ezana; and influence carried by vocalised Indian scripts reaching the Aksumite court through Red Sea trade contact. Comparing the timing, the epigraphic evidence and the trade record for each explanation, the volume's contributors find none conclusive, since Aksum's fourth-century contacts touched all three at once; the dating of the change is settled, its cause is not.
Attributions
Associated Sound
d 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script
Origins
Origin Period
Descends from the Ancient South Arabian script; the vocalised seven-order form appears on Aksumite inscriptions of the fourth century CE 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script
Place of Origin
The kingdom of Aksum, in the northern highlands of what are now Ethiopia and Eritrea 2Tradition: The Ge'ez script
Origin of the Name
The Ge'ez letter names are traditional names carried with the script; some are recognisably the inherited Semitic words and others are not, and the relation of the set as a whole to the Northwest Semitic names is only partly recoverable 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script
Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural Role
The script of the Ge'ez liturgy of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches, where the text is chanted rather than read silently 4Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity
Open Questions
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name inside the Ge'ez tradition
Dant's own description discusses the church's separate chant notation rather than the name's ancestry, and states no cognate or sense.
Identity
Script Type
An abugida: each base consonant is written in seven vowel orders and is never written without a vowel of its own, which sets the script apart from the consonantal abjads of the rest of the Semitic family 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script
Position
Nineteenth of twenty-six in the halehame order, the traditional order of the fidel, which is not the inherited Semitic order 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script
How the Letter Joins
The letters do not join, and the script runs left to right, unlike every other Semitic script of comparable age 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script
Use
Ritual Use
Read, chanted and copied in the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches, and used for the religious texts of the Ethiopian Jewish tradition 3Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Ge'ez numbers are written with a separate set of twenty numeral characters, so no numeral value attaches to a letter and the script has no counterpart to Hebrew gematria or the Arabic abjad reckoning 5Tradition: The Ge'ez script
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Written in seven orders, ge'ez, ka'eb, salis, rabi', hamis, sadis and sabi', which carry the seven vowels of the classical language; the first order is the citation form and the others modify its shape 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script
Learn More
Dant, and the Triads That Run Through the Inventory

Dant writes a plain d and continues the Semitic consonant behind the Hebrew daleth, the Syriac dalath and the Arabic dal. The Northwest Semitic name means door. The Ge'ez name is not glossed in the tradition and no meaning is recorded for it here.

The letter is one member of a pattern that organises much of the Semitic consonant system. Sounds tend to come in threes: a voiced member, a voiceless member and an emphatic one. At the dental place that gives d, t and the emphatic t, which in Ge'ez is tayt. At the sibilants it gives z, s and the emphatic s of saday. At the velars it gives g, k and the emphatic k of qaf. The pattern is not perfect, and the labial series is the obvious gap, because Ge'ez inherited b but no p at all.

Reading the fidel with that pattern in mind makes the inventory look less like a list. Each of these letters has partners, the partners are predictable, and the places where a partner is missing or doubled are exactly the places where the interesting history is. The two p letters at the end of the order and the two emphatic sibilants in the middle of it are both such places.

English has nothing at the emphatic place, which is why transcriptions of the Semitic languages fall back on dots and underlines. A dot beneath a t in a scholarly transliteration of Ge'ez is not decoration. It is the whole difference between tawe and tayt, and dropping it, as popular writing usually does, makes two letters of the fidel indistinguishable on the page.

Debtera, and the Training Behind the Chant

Debtera, the word for the learned cantors of the Ethiopian church, begins with this letter. A debtera is not ordained. He has passed through the traditional church schools, which teach reading, then the chant with its notation, then qene, the art of composing extempore verse in Ge'ez on a given occasion, and in some schools the computus that fixes the calendar. The training runs for years and a student commonly travels between schools to take each stage from a recognised teacher.

Qene is worth singling out. It is a short poem in Ge'ez, composed on the spot and sung in the liturgy, built around a deliberate double sense in which a surface meaning covers a second one. The tradition calls the figure wax and gold, the wax being the mould and the gold the thing cast inside it. It is a demanding form in a language nobody speaks natively.

Debtera also carry a popular reputation as makers of protective scrolls and as knowing more than the clergy about certain kinds of remedy, and that reputation is part of how they are regarded rather than an accusation the atlas is making. Both sides of it, the schooling and the reputation, belong to any honest description of the office.

The schools are the institution behind all of this. They are attached to churches and monasteries rather than to any university, they run on the traditional stages of the curriculum, and a student supports himself while attending one. They are the mechanism by which a dead language, a chant repertory and a method of calculating the calendar have all been carried forward without a printing press.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Related To

Dalath ܕ, Alphabet Letters

Dant and the Syriac dalath continue the Semitic d. The Syriac name is the word for a door; the Ge'ez name is not glossed in the tradition.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Daleth ד, Alphabet Letters

Dant and the Hebrew daleth continue the Semitic d. The Hebrew name means door. The Ge'ez name is not glossed in the tradition and no sense for it is recorded here.

Source Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)Wolf Leslau
Sources
1. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996View the Source
2. Ancient Churches of Ethiopia: Fourth-Fourteenth Centuries
David W. Phillipson, Yale University Press, 2009
3. Ethiopia and the Bible (The Schweich Lectures 1967)
Edward Ullendorff, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1968View the Source
4. Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant: An Anthology
Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Peter Jeffery, A-R Editions, 1993
5. The Unicode Standard
The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode ConsortiumView the Source
Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)
Wolf Leslau, Otto Harrassowitz, 1987
Open Questions (1 open question)
Do the Ge'ez letter names carry a sense inside Ge'ez, or are they inherited forms only?

A few Ge'ez letter names are transparently words in the language: bet is a house, gaml is a camel, and the word behind res is the word for a head. Most are not, and several, nahas among them, resemble Ge'ez words closely enough to invite a gloss that nothing supports. The atlas records no meaning for those letters, which is a statement about the evidence and leaves open whether the Ethiopian tradition itself ever attached senses to them.

What would resolve this A survey of the Ge'ez grammatical and church-school literature for any indigenous account of the letter names, set against the comparative reconstruction of the Northwest Semitic names, would show whether an Ethiopian gloss tradition exists and what it says.
Ethiopian philology and the history of the traditional church schoolsDivinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.