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Gafat Language
The Gafat language is an extinct South Ethiopic language once spoken by the Gafat people along the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, and later, speakers pushed south of Gojjam in what is now East Welega Zone. Gafat was related to the Harari language and Eastern Gurage languages. The records of this language are extremely sparse. There is a translation of the Song of Songs written in the 17th or 18th Century held at the Bodleian Library. Charles Beke collected a word list in the early 1840s with difficulty from the few who knew the language, having found that "the rising generation seem to be altogether ignorant of it; and those grown-up persons who profess to speak it are anything but familiar with it." The most recent accounts of this language are the reports of Wolf Leslau, who visited the region in 1947 and after considerable work was able to find a total of four people who could still speak the language. Edward Ullendorff, in his brief exposition on Gafat, concludes that as of the ti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east and northeast, Kenya to the south, South Sudan to the west, and Sudan to the northwest. Ethiopia has a total area of . As of 2022, it is home to around 113.5 million inhabitants, making it the 13th-most populous country in the world and the 2nd-most populous in Africa after Nigeria. The national capital and largest city, Addis Ababa, lies several kilometres west of the East African Rift that splits the country into the African and Somali tectonic plates. Anatomically modern humans emerged from modern-day Ethiopia and set out to the Near East and elsewhere in the Middle Paleolithic period. Southwestern Ethiopia has been proposed as a possible homeland of the Afroasiatic la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Extinct Languages Of Africa
Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point. Because a species' potential range may be very large, determining this moment is difficult, and is usually done retrospectively. This difficulty leads to phenomena such as Lazarus taxa, where a species presumed extinct abruptly "reappears" (typically in the fossil record) after a period of apparent absence. More than 99% of all species that ever lived on Earth, amounting to over five billion species, are estimated to have died out. It is estimated that there are currently around 8.7 million species of eukaryote globally, and possibly many times more if microorganisms, like bacteria, are included. Notable extinct animal species include non-avian dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, dodos, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hiob Ludolf
Hiob or Job Ludolf ( la, Iobus Ludolfus or '; 15 June 1624– 8 April 1704), also known as Job Leutholf, was a German orientalist, born at Erfurt. Edward Ullendorff rates Ludolf as having "the most illustrious name in Ethiopic scholarship". Life After studying philology at the Erfurt academy and at Leiden, he travelled in order to increase his linguistic knowledge. While searching in Rome for some documents at the request of the Swedish Court (1649), he became friends with Abba Gorgoryos, a monk from the Ethiopian province of Amhara, and acquired from him an intimate knowledge of the Ethiopian language of Amhara. In 1652 he entered the service of the duke of Saxe-Gotha, in which he continued until 1678, when he retired to Frankfurt am Main. In 1683 he visited England to promote a cherished scheme for establishing trade with Ethiopia, but his efforts were unsuccessful, chiefly due to the resistance of the authorities of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Returning to Frankfurt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Travels To Discover The Source Of The Nile, In The Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 And 1773
''Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773'' is a multi-volume account by the Scottish traveller James Bruce (1730–94) of his journeys in the Horn of Africa, which includes an eye-witness account of Ethiopian history and culture, as well as a description of that country and the neighboring kingdom of Sennar and the Ottoman province of Habesh. Bruce and his sensational stories were received with incredulity upon his return to London in 1774 after more than a dozen years of travel in North Africa and Abyssinia (Ethiopia) where he traced the Blue Nile. His ''Travels'' was issued in 1790, after he retired to his home at Kinnaird, at the urging of his friend Daines Barrington. It was published in five octavo volumes, lavishly illustrated, but was ridiculed by scholars and other travellers as being exaggerated nonsense. An example of the criticism his account received would be the comments of Henry Salt, who after visiting E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Bruce
James Bruce of Kinnaird (14 December 1730 – 27 April 1794) was a Scottish traveller and travel writer who confirmed the source of the Blue Nile. He spent more than a dozen years in North Africa and Ethiopia and in 1770 became the first European to trace the origins of the Blue Nile from Egypt and Sudan. Early life James Bruce was born at the family seat of Kinnaird, Stirlingshire, and educated at Harrow School and Edinburgh University, and began to study for the bar, but his marriage to the daughter of a wine importer and merchant resulted in him entering that business instead. His wife died in October 1754, within nine months of marriage, and Bruce thereafter travelled in Portugal and Spain as part of the wine trade. The examination of oriental manuscripts at the Escorial in Spain led him to the study of Arabic and Ge'ez and determined his future career. In 1758 his father's death placed him in possession of the estate of Kinnaird. To North Africa On the outbreak of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johann Christoph Adelung
Johann Christoph Adelung (8 August 173210 September 1806) was a German grammarian and philologist. Biography He was born at Spantekow, in Western Pomerania, and educated at schools in Anklam and Berge Monastery, Magdeburg, and the University of Halle. In 1759 he was appointed professor at the gymnasium of Erfurt, but relinquished this situation two years later and went to reside in a private capacity at Leipzig, where he devoted himself to philological researches. In 1787 he received the appointment of principal librarian to the Elector of Saxony at Dresden, where he continued to reside until his death in 1806. Work The writings of Adelung are voluminous. By means of his excellent grammars, dictionary, and various works on German style, he contributed greatly towards rectifying the orthography, refining the idiom, and fixing the standard of his native tongue. His German dictionary ''Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart'' (1774–1786) bears witness to th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Ullendorff
Edward Ullendorff (1920–2011) was a British scholar and historian. He was a prominent figure in Ethiopian Studies and also contributed work on the Semitic languages. Biography Born on 25 January 1920 in Zurich, Switzerland, Ullendorff was educated at the Graues Kloster in Berlin, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the University of Oxford. Ullendorff was first lecturer, and then Reader, in Semitic Languages at the University of St Andrews (1950–1959), Professor of Semitic Languages at the University of Manchester (1959–1964). From 1964 to 1979, he was Professor of Ethiopic at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and then Professor of Semitic Studies from 1979 to 1982. Prior to his death in 2011, Ullendorff was Professor Emeritus at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In 1971, Ullendorff served as president of the Society for Old Testament Study. Ullendorff married Dina Noack in 1943. She provided lifelong support for his academic resear ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wolf Leslau
__NOTOC__ Wolf Leslau ( yi, וולף לסלאו; born November 14, 1906 in Krzepice, Vistula Land, Poland; died November 18, 2006 in Fullerton, California) was a scholar of Semitic languages and one of the foremost authorities on Semitic languages of Ethiopia. Youth and education Leslau was born in Krzepice, a small town near Częstochowa, Poland. When he was a child his family was very poor, and after contracting tuberculosis he usually had to keep a thermometer with him to monitor his body temperature, although the reasons for this are unknown. He was orphaned by the age of 10, and was raised by his brother, and received a yeshiva education. To avoid military service in the Polish army, he gave up his Polish citizenship (becoming a stateless person) and emigrated to Vienna, where he would engage in Semitic studies at the University of Vienna until 1931. He then went to the Sorbonne to study under Marcel Cohen. His studies included most of the Semitic languages, including H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Tilstone Beke
Charles Tilstone Beke (10 October 1800 – 31 July 1874) was an English traveller, geographer and Biblical critic. Biography Born in Stepney, London, the son of a merchant in the City of London, for a few years Beke engaged in mercantile pursuits. He later studied law at Lincoln's Inn, and for a time practised at the Bar, but finally devoted himself to the study of historical, geographical and ethnographical subjects. The first fruits of Beke's researches appeared in his work ''Origines Biblicae'' or ''Researches in Primeval History'', published in 1834. An attempt to reconstruct the early history of the human race from geological data, it raised a storm of opposition on the part of defenders of the traditional readings of the Book of Genesis, but in recognition of the value of the work, the University of Tübingen conferred upon him the degree of PhD. Between 1837 and 1838, Beke held the post of acting British consul in Saxony. From that time until his death, his attention wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bodleian Library
The Bodleian Library () is the main research library of the University of Oxford, and is one of the oldest libraries in Europe. It derives its name from its founder, Sir Thomas Bodley. With over 13 million printed items, it is the second-largest library in Britain after the British Library. Under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003, it is one of six legal deposit libraries for works published in the United Kingdom, and under Irish law it is entitled to request a copy of each book published in the Republic of Ireland. Known to Oxford scholars as "Bodley" or "the Bod", it operates principally as a reference library and, in general, documents may not be removed from the reading rooms. In 2000, a number of libraries within the University of Oxford were brought together for administrative purposes under the aegis of what was initially known as Oxford University Library Services (OULS), and since 2010 as the Bodleian Libraries, of which the Bodleian Library is the largest ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gurage Languages
The Gurage languages (Gurage: ጉራጌ), also known as Guragie, is a dialect-continuum language, which belong to the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by the Gurage people, who inhabit the Gurage Zone within the larger multi-ethnic Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region in central Ethiopia. Overview The Gurage dialects form what is collectively called ''Guragigna'' or Guragigna. Almost all of the dialects are intelligible with other dialects indicating that they have organic relationships as well as indicating that they originated from a proto-Gurage language. Guragigna and its dialects belong to the Southern subdivision of the Ethiopian Semitic languages within the Afroasiatic family. All the Gurage subgroups (Northern, Western, and Eastern Gurage) belong to South Ethiopic. East Gurage is related to Harari and Gafat, while Northern and Western Gurage are related to each other. All Guragigna languages and dialects are written ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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