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Alphabet Letters

May (Ma) መ

Ge'ez Letters

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

May is the fourth letter of the Ge'ez fidel and writes a plain m. Ge'ez is written from left to right, which sets it apart from every other Semitic script of any antiquity: Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic and the Ancient South Arabian script from which Ge'ez descends all run right to left, or in the South Arabian case in either direction. The change of direction happened alongside the change from a consonantal script to a vocalised one, in the Aksumite period, and the two together mark the point at which the Ethiopian script became a thing of its own rather than a provincial form of a South Arabian one.

Facts
Attributions
Associated Sound
m 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
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.
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
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
Open Questions
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name inside the Ge'ez tradition
May's own description states no sense for its name. Res's own entry lists May among the Ge'ez names that are recognisably inherited, but does not itself supply the sense, and no other consulted source supplies one either.
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
Fourth 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
May, and the Consonants That Never Changed

May writes a plain m and is among the most stable consonants in the Semitic family. Its cognates are the Hebrew mem, the Syriac mim and the Arabic mim, and the correspondence needs no argument: the sound is the same in every branch, the name is recognisably the same word, and no sound change anywhere in the family has disturbed it. Beside the sibilants and the pharyngeals, which have shifted and merged differently in every language, m is a fixed point that the harder correspondences can be measured against.

May closes the group of four letters that give the Ge'ez order its traditional name. Ha, la, ha, ma read as a word is halehame, and the name works only because those four stand in that sequence, which is the South Semitic order rather than the abjad one. In Hebrew the same letter is thirteenth. Here it is fourth.

The Northwest Semitic name mem is the word for water, and the letter is understood acrophonically. Ge'ez may is close enough to be the same inherited name, but Ge'ez does not gloss it, and the atlas does not supply the Hebrew gloss on its behalf. Two things can be stated: that the letters descend from one ancestor, and that only one branch kept a meaning attached to it.

Meskel, the Cross, and the Feast of Its Finding

Meskel, the Ge'ez word for a cross, begins with this letter, and it names one of the great feasts of the Ethiopian and Eritrean church year. The feast commemorates the finding of the True Cross and is kept in September with the building and burning of a tall conical bonfire, the demera, around which the clergy process in vestments while the singing goes on into the night. It is one of the moments when the whole apparatus this script serves becomes visible at once: the chant, the processional crosses, the ceremonial umbrellas, the drums and the sistra.

The cross is also the most reproduced form in Ethiopian religious art. Hand crosses, processional crosses and neck crosses are worked in openwork patterns that vary by region and by workshop, and a cross made at Lalibela and one made at Gondar are not interchangeable objects.

The same letter opens mashaf, the word for a book or a written volume, which is the other thing the script exists to serve. Between the cross and the book a Ge'ez sentence can name most of what an Ethiopian church physically contains, and the letter that begins both words is the fourth one a child meets in the recitation of the grid.

The word also gives a name. Mesqel stands in personal names of the kind Ethiopian naming favours, where a noun in the construct state is followed by a sacred term, so a form meaning the servant of the Cross is an ordinary name to meet and has been borne by kings. The vocabulary of the feasts and the vocabulary of ordinary naming are not separate things here.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Related To

Mem מ, Alphabet Letters

May and the Hebrew mem continue the Semitic m, one of the consonants no branch of the family has disturbed. The two letter names are the same inherited word.

Source Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)Wolf Leslau
Mim ܡ, Alphabet Letters

May and the Syriac mim continue the Semitic m, and both keep the inherited name of the letter with little change.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
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
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