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Gafat Language - Wikipedia

The Gafat language is an extinct Ethio-Semitic language that was once spoken by the Gafat people in Ethiopia, with sparse records including a translation of the Song of Songs from the 17th or 18th century. Efforts to document the language in the 19th and 20th centuries revealed that very few speakers remained, leading to its classification as virtually extinct. The language is related to Harari and Eastern Gurage languages and is part of the Afro-Asiatic language family.

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40 views3 pages

Gafat Language - Wikipedia

The Gafat language is an extinct Ethio-Semitic language that was once spoken by the Gafat people in Ethiopia, with sparse records including a translation of the Song of Songs from the 17th or 18th century. Efforts to document the language in the 19th and 20th centuries revealed that very few speakers remained, leading to its classification as virtually extinct. The language is related to Harari and Eastern Gurage languages and is part of the Afro-Asiatic language family.

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Gafat language

The Gafat language is an extinct Ethio-Semitic 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.[1][2] Gafat was related to the Harari language and Eastern Gurage languages.[3] 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 Tilstone Beke collected a word list in the


Gafat
early 1840s with difficulty from the few who knew
the language, having found that "the rising Native to Ethiopia

generation seem to be altogether ignorant of it; Gafat


Ethnicity
and those grown-up persons who profess to
speak it are anything but familiar with it."[4] The Extinct (date missing)

most recent accounts of this language are the Afro-Asiatic


Language family
reports of Wolf Leslau, who visited the region in Semitic
West Semitic
1947 and after considerable work was able to find South Semitic
Ethiopic
a total of four people who could still speak the South
Outer
language. Edward Ullendorff, in his brief n-group
Gafat
exposition on Gafat, concludes that as of the time
of his writing, "one may ... expect that it has now Language codes
virtually breathed its last."[5]
ISO 639-3 gft

Notes Linguist List gft.html (http


s://web.archiv
e.org/web/20200
1. Lipiński, Edward (2001). Semitic Languages: 101010101/htt
p://multitree.o
Outline of a Comparative Grammar (https://b
rg/codes/gft.ht
ooks.google.com/books?id=IiXVqyEkPKcC& ml)
pg=PA89) . Peeters Publishers. p. 89.
Glottolog gafa1240 (http
ISBN 978-90-429-0815-4. s://glottolog.o
rg/resource/lan
2. Fage, J. D.; Oliver, Roland (1975). The guoid/id/gafa12
Cambridge History of Africa (https://books.g 40)

oogle.com/books?id=GWjxR61xAe0C&pg=P
A128) . Cambridge University Press. p. 128. ISBN 978-0-521-20981-6.
3. Pankhurst, Richard (1997). The Ethiopian Borderlands: Essays in Regional History from Ancient
Times to the End of the 18th Century (https://books.google.com/books?id=zpYBD3bzW1wC&pg
=PA89) . The Red Sea Press. p. 89. ISBN 978-0-932415-19-6.

4. Charles T. Beke, "Abyssinia: Being a Continuation of Routes in That Country", Journal of the
Royal Geographical Society of London (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1798047) , 14 (1844), p.
41

5. Ullendorff, Edward. The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People, Second Edition
(London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 131.

Bibliography

Adelung, Johann Christoph. (1812). Mithridates, oder allgemeine Sprachkunde. Berlin. [vol. 3,
p. 124–125: the same page from the Gafat text of the Song of Songs as in Bruce 1804 below].

Beke, Charles Tilstone. (1846). "On the Languages and Dialects of Abyssinia and the Countries to
the South", in: Proceedings of the Philological Society 2 (London), pp. 89–107.

Bruce, James. (1804). Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770,
1771, 1772 and 1773. 2nd ed. Edinburgh. [vol. 2, pp. 491–499: "Vocabulary of the Amharic,
Falashan, Gafat, Agow and Tcheretch Agow Languages"; vol. 7, plate III: a page from the Gafat
text of the Song of Songs].

Leslau, Wolf (1944), "The Position of Gafat in Ethiopic", in Language 20, pp. 56–65.

Leslau, Wolf. (1945). Gafat Documents: Records of a South-Ethiopic Language. American Oriental
Series, no. 28. New Haven.

Leslau, Wolf. (1956). Etudes descriptive et comparative du gafat (éthiopien méridional). Paris: C.
Klincksieck.

Ludolf, Hiob, Historia Aethiopica. Francofurti ad Moenum. [there are 3 sentences in Gafat with
Latin translation in chapter 10, §60].

Franz Praetorius. (1879). Die amharische Sprache. Halle. pp. 13–14.

External links

Gafat Documents: Records of a South Ethiopic Language (1945) by Leslau (https://archive.org/de


tails/rosettaproject_gft_vertxt-1)
This Semitic languages-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it (https://
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gafat_language&action=edit).

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