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Ethiopic

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Ethiopic

 

(also Geez), the liturgical language, no longer spoken, of the Monophysite Church. Ethiopic belongs to the Ethiopic subgroup of the southwestern group of Semitic languages; there is another classification of Ethiopic (see).

Ethiopic developed from one of the South Arabic dialects brought into Ethiopia in the fifth century B.C. by immigrants from southern Arabia. In the fourth century of the Common Era it acquired a syllabic alphabet based on the South Arabic consonantal writing system. It was the official language of the Aksum Kingdom (fourth to seventh centuries) and of subsequent Ethiopian states until supplanted by Amharic in the 13th century.

The only known Ethiopic texts of the Aksum period are inscriptions on steles. Religious books and certain secular books translated from Greek and Syriac in this period have survived only in later editions, the earliest dating from the 13th century. Ethiopic continued to be used as a literary language until the early 20th century.

REFERENCES

Krachkovskii, I. Iu. Vvedenie v efiopskuiu filologiiu. Leningrad, 1955.
Starinin, V. P. Efiopskii iazyk. Moscow, 1967.
Ullendorff, E. The Semitic Languages of Ethiopia. London, 1955.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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(30) For a concise introduction including most up to date discoveries see Loren Stuckenbruck, "1 Enoch or Ethiopic Enoch in Outline," https://www.academia.edu/7820262/Condensed_Outline_and_Introduction_to_1_Enoch_or_Ethiopic_Enoch, accessed September 12, 2015.
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