Alphabet Letters
Qaf (Qa) ቀ
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
Qaf is the eighth letter of the Ge'ez fidel and writes an ejective k, a stop released with a closed glottis rather than with breath. Ge'ez has a set of these ejective consonants, qaf, tayt, payt and saday among them, which are a feature of the Ethiopian Semitic languages and of the wider linguistic area they sit in, and they are among the sounds a reader of the liturgy has to produce correctly. Qaf also heads one of the labiovelar series, a group of letters written with a rounded lip quality, which the character standard records separately and which the atlas does not count among the twenty-six.
Facts
Transmission
Manuscript TraditionGe'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 SourceWhy 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 SoundAn ejective k 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Origins
Origin PeriodDescends 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 OriginThe kingdom of Aksum, in the northern highlands of what are now Ethiopia and Eritrea 2Tradition: The Ge'ez script Origin of the NameThe 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 RoleThe 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 NameNot established for this letter's own name inside the Ge'ez tradition
Qaf's own description discusses its ejective consonant and its labiovelar series and states no cognate or sense for its name. Identity
Script TypeAn 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 PositionEighth 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 JoinsThe 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 UseRead, 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 SourceGe'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 SourceWritten 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
Qaf, and What an Emphatic Consonant Actually Is
Qaf writes a k released with a closed glottis, an ejective, and it continues the Semitic consonant behind the Hebrew qoph, the Syriac qaph and the Arabic qaf. The name is close to unchanged across all four alphabets.
The interesting question is what the sound originally was. Semitic grammar describes a class of consonants as emphatic, but the word is a label for a correspondence rather than a description of a sound, because the class is realised quite differently in different branches. In Arabic the emphatics are pharyngealised, made with the back of the tongue drawn towards the throat. In the Ethiopian Semitic languages they are ejectives, made by closing the glottis and compressing the air above it. In Hebrew as it is now read the distinction has gone entirely.
A good deal of comparative work has argued that the ejective realisation is the older one, on the grounds that the Ethiopian languages sit beside Cushitic languages with the same feature, and that a shift from ejective to pharyngealised is easier to motivate than the reverse. The atlas does not adjudicate the reconstruction. It records that qaf is an ejective in Ge'ez, that its Arabic cognate is not, and that the shared label emphatic conceals that difference rather than explaining it.
Qeddase, and a Liturgy With More Than One Anaphora
Qeddase, the Ge'ez word for the Divine Liturgy, begins with this letter, as does qeddus, holy. The Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches celebrate the eucharist from a collection of anaphoras rather than from a single fixed text, and which one is used depends on the day and the feast. That is unusual. Most liturgical traditions settled long ago on one or two, and the Ethiopian collection is among the largest still in active use anywhere.
The texts are in Ge'ez and they are sung rather than spoken. The chant that carries them is the zema repertory, transmitted with its own notation and its own long training, so a priest or a cantor learns the anaphoras as melody as much as text. A printed Ge'ez missal therefore under-describes what happens in a church, because the letters on the page are one layer of a performance that also has notation, movement, vestment and drum.
The word is built on the root behind qeddus, holy, the same root that stands behind the Hebrew qadosh and the Arabic quddus. A reader who knows one Semitic language will recognise it, and that recognition is the practical value of a comparative dictionary: the vocabulary of Ethiopian worship is not isolated but continuous with the rest of the family, however far the script and the melody have gone their own way.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Qaf and the Syriac qaph continue the same Semitic consonant and keep the same name. Ge'ez realises it as an ejective; Syriac does not.
Qaf and the Hebrew qoph continue the same Semitic consonant and carry the same name. Ge'ez makes it an ejective; the Hebrew reading tradition no longer distinguishes it from a plain k.
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
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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