Alphabet Letters
Yaman (Ya) የ
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
Yaman is the eighteenth letter of the Ge'ez fidel and writes the semivowel y. Its name is the inherited Semitic one behind Hebrew yod, though the Ge'ez form has moved further from the original than most. Ethiopian Jews, the Beta Israel, have also used this script and the Ge'ez language for their own religious texts, so the fidel serves two distinct religious communities as well as the everyday writing of Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre. A script shared across that range of use has to be described as a living writing system rather than as the property of any one tradition within it.
Facts
Attributions
Associated Soundy 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 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. 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 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 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 PositionEighteenth 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 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 Open Questions
Sense of the NameNot established for this letter's own name inside the Ge'ez tradition
Yaman's own description names Hebrew yod as its inherited Semitic cognate but states no sense, and adds that the Ge'ez form has moved further from the original than most Ge'ez letter names, naming extra uncertainty rather than less. The comparative reconstruction credits yod with the sense hand (already live on Hebrew Yod), but whether the Ge'ez tradition itself ever attached that sense to the name, rather than only the form, is untested. Learn More
Yaman, and an Order That Is Not Arranged by Sound
Yaman writes the semivowel y and continues the Semitic consonant behind the Hebrew yod, the Syriac yudh and the Arabic ya. Of all the Ge'ez letter names this is among those that have drifted furthest from the inherited form, and no sense is recorded for it here.
Its position is a good place to make a point about the order as a whole. Yaman is the eighteenth letter, and nothing about the sound y explains why it should be eighteenth. The halehame order is inherited, not designed. It was received from the South Arabian tradition and kept, and its sequence records the history of a teaching practice rather than any analysis of the sounds.
That is worth setting beside the Indian alphabets the atlas also holds. The Devanagari order is not inherited but constructed: the Sanskrit phoneticians arranged the letters by where in the mouth each sound is made, running from the throat forwards to the lips, with the vowels first and the sibilants last, and the arrangement is an argument about phonetics laid out as a chart. The Ge'ez order is a tradition, the Devanagari order is a theory, and the two scripts are therefore evidence about quite different things. An alphabet chart looks like the same kind of object in both cases and is not.
Yared, and Where the Ethiopian Chant Is Said to Come From
Yared, the name of the saint to whom the Ethiopian chant tradition is attributed, begins with this letter. The tradition places him in the sixth century at Aksum and holds that the melodies were revealed to him, and it credits him with the three modes and with the antiphonary called the Digua, the largest of the chant books.
The attribution is what the tradition says, and the atlas records it as such. What can be established independently is thinner: the chant books in their present form are considerably later than the sixth century, the notation is later still, and the question of how much of the repertory can be traced to any single origin is open. Saying so is not a challenge to the tradition. A tradition that attributes a repertory to a founder is making a claim about authority and continuity, and it is a different kind of claim from a dating.
Yared is a saint of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church with his own feast, and the chant is sung in his name daily. Both statements are secure. What sits between them, the history of how a body of melody accumulated across a millennium and came to be gathered under one name, is a research question, and the atlas prefers to leave it visible as one rather than close it in either direction.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Yaman and the Hebrew yod continue the Semitic y. The Ge'ez name has drifted further from the inherited form than most names in the fidel, and no meaning is recorded for it.
Yaman and the Syriac yudh continue the Semitic y. The Syriac name stays close to the inherited form where the Ge'ez one has drifted well away from it.
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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