RIDDLES AS INDICATOR OF CULTURAL AND LINGUISTIC CONVERGENCE IN THE GURAGE REGION

Abstract

Ethiopia as a language and culture areaMore than 70 languages belonging to four different language groups are spoken in Ethiopia. 1 Most of these languages have only a few thousand speakers, who are usually bi-or multilingual.2 Also among speakers of major languages bi-and multilingualism is a very widespread phenomenon.The majority of Ethiopian languages are not taught at schools.Speakers gain their proficiency in second languages from face-to-face contacts.This multilingualism is not a recent development but has prevailed for several centuries, as Ethiopian languages have converged in parts of their lexicon, grammar and syntax.The investigation of the Ethiopian language convergence area has been a major topic both in Ethiopian studies 3 and in general linguistics for a long time.4* I am grateful to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD; HSP III) and the SFB 295 Kulturelle und sprachliche Kontakte (Cultural and language contacts) at Mainz University financed by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) who both have supported my several field stays in Ethiopia from 1998 through 2004.Furthermore, I thank the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (IES) at Addis Ababa University for its cooperation.1 The analysis and description of Ethiopian cultures and languages was one main topic in the work of the late Sevir B. Chernetsov, who, being interested in a number of topics ranging from the early medieval Ethiopian history to Ethiopian folklore painting, also focused soberly, but often with humor, on the connection between social, political and environmental circumstances, on the one hand, and cultural and languages developments, on the other hand.The present article has been inspired by CHERNETSOV (1980) [for the list of abbreviations used in this paper see p. 186-188], in which he investigates the creation of a socialist nomenclature for Amharic.He clearly outlines the historical roots of cognitive concepts and their influence on the respective choice of new terms among Amharic speakers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.