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World (foreign language) :: Dr. Atkins' Diet Plan dratkinsdietplan.info | Language Difficulties - Spinal Cord Injury, Brain Injury brainandspinalcord.org | Receptive and Expressive Language minnesotavisiontherapy.co... | Speech Language Pathology gshleb.org |
For other uses please see Tigre (disambiguation) Tigre (Ge'ez ትግረ tigre or ትግሬ tigrē; sometimes written as Tigré, also known as Xasa in Sudan; Arabic الخاصية ḫāṣiyah) is a Semitic language which along with Tigrinya is believed to be one of direct descendants of the extinct Ge'ez language. (Ge'ez is still in use as the liturgical language of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church.) As of 1997, Tigré was spoken by approximately 800,000 people in Eritrea.[1] The Tigre people are nearly all found in western Eritrea, with the remainder inhabiting the adjacent part of Sudan. In Eritrea, they inhabit the central and northern plateau and the Red Sea shores north of Zula. Traditionally, the local language of the Dahlak Archipelago, Dahlik, has been considered a dialect of Tigré, but recently one researcher has reassessed this view. The Tigré people are not be confused with their neighbors to the south, the Tigrinya people of Eritrea and Ethiopia. The northern Ethiopian province which is now named the Tigray Region is a territory of the Tigrinyas. Traditionally, the Arabic alphabet was used to write Tigré, at least among Muslims. The Ge'ez alphabet has been used since since the 1902 translation of the New Testament by Tewolde-Medhin Gebre-Medhin, Dawit Amanuel, and Swedish missionaries. Many Muslim Tigrés still use the Arabic alphabet.[citation needed]
[edit] SoundsTigré has preserved the two pharyngeal consonants of Ge'ez. The Ge'ez vowel inventory has almost been preserved except that the two vowels which are phonetically close to [ɐ] and [a] seem to have evolved into a pair of phonemes which have the same quality (the same articulation) but differ in length; [a] vs. [aː]. The original phonemic distinction according to quality survives in Tigrinya and Amharic. The vowel [ɐ], traditionally named "first order vowel", is most commonly transcribed ä in Semitic linguistics. The phonemes of Tigré are displayed below in both International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols (indicated by the IPA brackets) and the symbols common (though not universal) among linguists who work on Ethiopian Semitic languages. For the long vowel /aː/, the symbol 'ā' is used per Raz (1983). Three consonants, /p, p', x/, occur only in a small number of loanwords, hence they are written in parentheses. As in other Ethiopian Semitic languages, the phonemic status of /ǝ/ is questionable; it may be possible to treat it as an epenthetic vowel that is introduced to break up consonant clusters.
[edit] Consonant lengthConsonant length is phonemic in Tigré (that is, a pair of words can be distinct by consonant length alone), although there are few such minimal pairs. Some consonants do not occur long; these include the pharyngeal consonants, the glottal consonants, /w/, and /j/. In this language, long consonants arise almost solely by gemination as a morphological process; there are few, if any, long consonants in word roots. Gemination is especially prominent in verb morphology. [edit] See also[edit] Notes[edit] External links
'[1] Awkir
[edit] Bibliography
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