Silt'e language

Silt'e (ስልጥኘ [siltʼiɲɲə] or የስልጤ አፍ [jəsiltʼe af]) is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in central Ethiopia. One of the Ethiopian Semitic languages, its speakers are the Silt'e, who mainly inhabit the Silte Zone in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region. Speakers of the Wolane dialect mainly inhabit the Kokir Gedebano district of Gurage Zone, as well as the neighbouring Seden Sodo district of Oromia. Some have also settled in urban areas in other parts of the country, especially Addis Ababa.

Speakers and dialects

Dialects of the Silt'e language include: Azernet-Berbere, Silti, Wuriro, Ulbareg and Wolane. There are about 940,000 native Silt'e speakers (2007 census); 125,000 speakers of Wolane.

Sounds and orthography

Consonants and vowels

Silt'e has a fairly typical set of consonants for an Ethiopian Semitic language. There are the usual ejective consonants, alongside plain voiceless and voiced consonants and all of the consonants, except /h/ and /ʔ/, can be geminated, that is, lengthened. However, Silt'e vowels differ considerably from the typical set of seven vowels in languages such as Amharic, Tigrinya and Ge'ez. Silt'e has the set of five short and five long vowels, that is typical of the nearby Eastern Cushitic languages, which may be the origin of the Silt'e system. There is considerable allophonic variation within the short vowels, especially for a; the most frequent allophone of /a/, [ə], is shown in the chart. All of the short vowels may be devoiced preceding a pause.

E language

E (simplified Chinese: 诶话; traditional Chinese: 誒話; pinyin: Ē Huà) or Wuse/Wusehua (simplified Chinese: 五色话; traditional Chinese: 五色話; pinyin: Wŭsè Huà; literally: "Colored Language") is a Tai–Chinese mixed language spoken primarily in Rongshui Miao Autonomous County, Guangxi, China. It contains features of both Tai and Chinese varieties, generally adopting Chinese vocabulary into Tai grammar. E is a tonal language—distinguishing between seven tones—and contains a few rare phonemes: voiceless versions of the more common nasal consonants and alveolar lateral approximant.

Etymology

The E language's unusual pinyin-transliterated name, which is also an autonym, consists of a single letter e. The character, which is written "诶" in Simplified Chinese and "誒" in Traditional Chinese, denotes an expression of affirmation. The language's speakers also refer to their language as Kjang E.Wusehua is a derogatory name for E.

Geographical distribution

In 1992, E was spoken by about 30,000 people, but by 2008 this number had dwindled to 9,000. Most E speakers are classified as Zhuang by the Chinese government. E speakers live primarily in the Guangxi autonomous region of China, specifically in the Rongshui Miao county and border areas of Luocheng Mulao. Villages inhabited by E speakers include Xiatan, Simo, Xinglong, and the Yonglei district. Ethnologue classifies E as rank 6b (Threatened). E speakers' most commonly spoken other languages are Yue Chinese and the Guiliu variant of Southwestern Mandarin.

Vaal–Orange language

Vaal–Orange, also known as Seroa, is an extinct ǃKwi language of South Africa and Lesotho. It comprised the ǂUngkue dialect (also rendered ǂKunkwe) of the Warrenton area, recorded by Carl Meinhof, and the ǁŨǁ’e dialect (also rendered ǁKu-ǁ’e or ǁKuǁe), spoken near Theunissen and Bethany in South Africa and into Lesotho, recorded by Dorothea Bleek.

The name "Vaal–Orange" comes from the Vaal and Orange Rivers, which converge where ǂUngkue dialect was spoken. Seroa is the Sesotho name, literally "language of the Baroa (Bushmen)".

Like ǀXam, ǂUngkue used 'inclusory' pronouns for compound subjects:

References

Transformational grammar

In linguistics, a transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar (TG, TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that involves the use of defined operations called transformations to produce new sentences from existing ones. The concept was originated by Noam Chomsky, and much current research in transformational grammar is inspired by Chomsky's Minimalist Program.

Deep structure and surface structure

In 1957, Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, in which he developed the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation — a deep structure and a surface structure. The deep structure represented the core semantic relations of a sentence, and was mapped on to the surface structure (which followed the phonological form of the sentence very closely) via transformations. Chomsky believed there are considerable similarities between languages' deep structures, and that these structures reveal properties, common to all languages that surface structures conceal. However, this may not have been the central motivation for introducing deep structure. Transformations had been proposed prior to the development of deep structure as a means of increasing the mathematical and descriptive power of context-free grammars. Similarly, deep structure was devised largely for technical reasons relating to early semantic theory. Chomsky emphasizes the importance of modern formal mathematical devices in the development of grammatical theory:

Silt'e

Silt'e (also transliterated Silte) can refer to a number of subjects:

Silt'e people

The Silt'e people also Silte people (ስልጤ; simplified form: Silte) are an ethnic group in southern Ethiopia. They inhabit today's Silt'e Zone which is part of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region. A considerable number of Silt'e live in Addis Ababa, Adama and other cities and smaller urban centres of southern Ethiopia where they make a living, e.g., as merchants or keepers of petty shops. In the countryside the Silt'e practise mixed farming and cultivate ensete.

The term Silt'e is the modern ethnonym of the speakers of the Silt'e language. Today's Silt'e comprise the following major historical sub-groups: Azernet, Berbere, Alichcho, Wuriro, Melga (or Ulbareg) and Silt'i (or Summusilt'i). The name Silt'i (for the subgroup) is derived from the alleged ancestor Gen Silt'i. The modern ethnonym Silt'e was chosen in memory of this ancestor and as a reminiscence of the old Islamic sultanate of Hadiyya the Silte people claim a historical relation to.

The great majority of the Silt'e population is Muslim. Until the second half of the twentieth century the Silt'e were considered as being part of the Gurage (but called Adiyya or Hadiyya by the Sebat Bet Gurage). Silte people are also called Adere by the neighbouring Arsi-Oromo which might indicate the relationship to the Adere (Harari) who live (in and around the historic city of Harar) miles away from where the Silte people are inhabiting. The two ethnic groups(Silte and Harari) share somewhat similar language and the same religion. Other designations were Islam or East Gurage (after their language which forms part of the East Gurage language area). After the fall of the Derg regime in 1991 a political movement formed to establish an independent ethnic identity for the Silt'e, as they now called themselves. Ten years later, the Silt'e were successful in obtaining an administrative independence from the Gurage Zone in the creation of the Silt'e Zone.