Basic Amharic Dictionary (original) (raw)

Contemporary Amharic Corpus: Automatically Morpho-Syntactically Tagged Amharic Corpus

ArXiv, 2021

We introduced the contemporary Amharic corpus, which is automatically tagged for morpho-syntactic information. Texts are collected from 25,199 documents from different domains and about 24 million orthographic words are tokenized. Since it is partly a web corpus, we made some automatic spelling error correction. We have also modified the existing morphological analyzer, HornMorpho, to use it for the automatic tagging.

Critical Analysis on Frequency of Amharic Sounds: the perspective of corpus Linguistics

Daagu International Journal of Basic & Applied Research, 2019

ABSTRACT Corpus linguistics basically give more emphasis to collocation, frequency and corpus statistics. This study intends to investigate the frequency of Sounds in Amharic, to explore the unique linguistic features found in Amharic, and to assess the nature and characteristics of Amharic fields. Critical research paradigm was used in this study. To achieve the objectives of the study the researcher used elicitation and documents analysis as data gathering method. To briefly summarize the findings of the study, in terms of sound articulations the characteristics of all consonants in Amharic is the same except ሀ /ha/. In Amharic lexicons the frequency of the sixth sound or sadɪs fidels is very high. More explicitly, in most basic or core vocabularies of Amharic the sixth or sadɪs fidels are occur frequently 68.75 % in average. This indicate that, the frequency of the sixth sound or sadɪs fidel in Amharic language is very high especially in basic or core vocabularies. The distribution of the sixth sound or sadɪs fidel is might be at the first syllable or the last syllable. Therefore its distribution is not common. In other words, the sadɪs sound may come at the beginning of word or middle of word or end of a lexicons. Orthographically speaking, single fidel or consonant can convey full text or message. For example: ና /na/ ‘come’, ያ /ja/ ‘that’this can be considered as the unique feature of the target language. In Amharic, it is very tough to get the sixth fidel followed by the long vowel. Therefore, in lexicon creativity and productivity linguists should consider the sixth fidel to create the non-existing lexicon in Amharic. Keywords: Corpus, fidel, Frequency, Amharic

An Examination of Amharic Grammar from Pre-17th Century Manuscripts

2013

The paper examines pre-17 th century Amharic manuscripts with regard to the diachronic grammar of Amharic. It examines particularly the imperial songs of Amdetsion Getatchew Haile (1970) which can all safely be dated back to the 16 th and pre-16 th centuries. It focuses mainly on the peculiar grammatical features of that period which are not observable in modern Amharic. Pre-17 th century Amharic exhibits all the pharyngeal and glottal phonemes typical of Semitic languages. Modern Amharic has rigid SOV. Relative clauses and adjectives must also follow their head noun. However, pre-17 th century Amharic was not rigid in this regard. Although structures like those in modern Amharic are also attested, we find a VSO order in pre-17 th century Amharic. Relative clauses and adjectives also follow the noun they modify. Pre-17th century Amharic in general shows more Semitic features than present-day Amharic. This is, in fact, expected if Amharic is seen as a descendant of a Semitic language; not as one created through a pidgin-induced process.

syntax of Amharic ideophones

Macrolinguistics and Microlinguistics

This study is on Amharic ideophones, a subject that has not been described well in the syntax of Amharic. The data used for the analysis are collected from natural settings of the Amharic-speaking community in Debre Birhan College of Teacher Education. The description shows that Amharic ideophones contradict some earlier generalizations made about the syntax of ideophones in such works which claim that ideophones do not fit in the grammar of other word classes in a language, and which states that ideophones do not enter any phrase structure, nor are they modified by other word classes. The description here shows that ideophones fit well into the grammar of the Amharic language. In contrast to such claims, they project different phrases such as noun phrases, which occur in subject and object positions and they can occur with or without a modifier. Their verb phrases appear with adverbial modifiers. Amharic ideophones can also be modifiers of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They form ...

The Morphology of Amharic Ideophones

Zena Lissan

Amharic ideophones are marginalized word classes in most descriptive grammar studies. However, this paper aims to describe and classify ideophones of the language. In addition to this, ideophones are universally considered to have little morphology. Nevertheless, this study identifies several morphological processes which ideophones of the language undergo. Amharic ideophones mainly undergo compounding, derivation, reduplication, and sometimes inflectional morphology. Moreover, in the language, ideophonic verb stems undergo total and partial reduplications. These reduplicated verb stems are further compounded with auxiliaries al-'say' and adərrəɡ-'do/make' to show verbal and adverbial functions. Besides, the study classifies ideophones mainly into verbal and nominal (noun) ideophones. Non-reduplicated ideophone-based verbs function as a verb and the reduplicated ideophone-based verbs have an adverbial function. Furthermore, ideophonic verbs collocate with the dummy verb al-'say' form intransitive verb, and ideophonic verbs which collocate with the dummy verb adərrəɡ-'do/make' form transitive verbs. As the finding shows, some simple nouns reduplicate and compound with auxiliaries to express taste, smells, and some internal feelings. Lastly, derived nominal ideophones also undergo inflections for nominative and accusative cases and number and gender like the regular nouns of the language.

Reliance on Predicative Units as a Method of Analysing and Translating Amharic Written Texts

Aethiopica

In analysing and translating Amharic texts, most foreign students have experienced major problems while trying to ‘redirect’ the rigidly leftbranching syntax of Amharic into the predominantly right-branching syntax of most European languages. The way out of this difficulty proposed by some teachers of Amharic consists in the so-called ‘translating from the end’ principle: the student begins to decipher the structure of an Amharic sentence from the finite verb form at its very end and gradually proceeds towards the beginning of the sentence, untangling—one by one—the syntactic structures involved. In the course of teaching Amharic, I have found this method largely inadequate for the purpose it is supposed to achieve. As an alternative to the ‘translating from the end’ method the author proposes another strategy which could be termed ‘reliance on predicative units’. In using this strategy, the student should, first of all, single out verb forms which are likely to perform the function...

An Update of the Manually Annotated Amharic Corpus

2018

The paper describes an update of the manually annotated Amharic corpus WIC 2.0. It lists the problems of the previous version of the corpus and shows that even small changes in the corpus annotation could lead to a higher quality of trained part-of-speech taggers.