Alphabet Letters
Hoy (Ha) ሀ
Ge'ez Letters
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Origin Descends from the Ancient South Arabian script; the vocalised seven-order form appears on Aksumite inscriptions of the fourth century CE
Hoy is the first letter of the Ge'ez fidel, the traditional order in which the script is learned and recited. Ge'ez is not an alphabet in the strict sense but an abugida: the letter shown here is the first of seven orders, and the same consonant is written in six further shapes for the six other vowels, so a reader who knows hoy knows one seventh of what the letter can do. The atlas records the twenty-six base consonants of classical Ge'ez as its letters and describes the seven orders as a property of each, which is how the fidel is taught and chanted in the church schools. Hoy writes a plain h, and stands first because the order begins with the throat consonants.
Facts
Attributions
Associated Soundh 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural RoleThe script of the Ge'ez liturgy of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches, where the text is chanted rather than read silently 4Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity Disputed
Meaning in the Attesting SourceWhy the script was vocalised in the fourth century CE, after centuries of writing consonants alone, is argued and not settled 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) reviews the Aksumite inscriptions that first show Ge'ez written with vocalisation, a fourth-century CE innovation that is not in dispute, and canvasses three explanations for why it happened then: an internal development inside the Aksumite royal chancery seeking a more precise script for administration; a response to the newly Christian court's need for scripture translated and taught with unambiguous vowels after Aksum's conversion under King Ezana; and influence carried by vocalised Indian scripts reaching the Aksumite court through Red Sea trade contact. Comparing the timing, the epigraphic evidence and the trade record for each explanation, the volume's contributors find none conclusive, since Aksum's fourth-century contacts touched all three at once; the dating of the change is settled, its cause is not. Origins
Origin PeriodDescends from the Ancient South Arabian script; the vocalised seven-order form appears on Aksumite inscriptions of the fourth century CE 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Place of OriginThe kingdom of Aksum, in the northern highlands of what are now Ethiopia and Eritrea 2Tradition: The Ge'ez script Origin of the NameThe Ge'ez letter names are traditional names carried with the script; some are recognisably the inherited Semitic words and others are not, and the relation of the set as a whole to the Northwest Semitic names is only partly recoverable 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Transmission
Manuscript TraditionGe'ez scripture and liturgical books are copied by hand on parchment and bound between wooden boards, a practice that has continued without interruption 3Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity Open Questions
Sense of the NameNot established for this letter's own name inside the Ge'ez tradition
Hoy's own description names no Semitic cognate and states no sense for its name. The atlas's recorded position for Ge'ez, stated on Res's own entry, is to record the traditional name rather than infer a meaning where none is stated in the source. Identity
Script TypeAn abugida: each base consonant is written in seven vowel orders and is never written without a vowel of its own, which sets the script apart from the consonantal abjads of the rest of the Semitic family 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script PositionFirst of twenty-six in the halehame order, the traditional order of the fidel, which is not the inherited Semitic order 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script How the Letter JoinsThe letters do not join, and the script runs left to right, unlike every other Semitic script of comparable age 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Use
Ritual UseRead, chanted and copied in the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches, and used for the religious texts of the Ethiopian Jewish tradition 3Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceGe'ez numbers are written with a separate set of twenty numeral characters, so no numeral value attaches to a letter and the script has no counterpart to Hebrew gematria or the Arabic abjad reckoning 5Tradition: The Ge'ez script Meaning in the Attesting SourceWritten in seven orders, ge'ez, ka'eb, salis, rabi', hamis, sadis and sabi', which carry the seven vowels of the classical language; the first order is the citation form and the others modify its shape 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Learn More
Hoy and the Order Called Halehame
Hoy continues the Semitic consonant reconstructed as a plain h, and its cognates are the Hebrew heh, the Syriac he and the Arabic ha. What is unusual is not the letter but its position. Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic all inherit an order that begins aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, the sequence that gives the word alphabet its name and that still governs Hebrew letter numerals. Ge'ez begins hoy, lawe, hawt, may, and the traditional name of the order, halehame, is those first four sounds read as a word.
The two orders are not variants of one another. The halehame sequence is the South Semitic order, found in the Ancient South Arabian inscriptions from which the Ethiopian script descends, and an abecedary tablet recovered at Ugarit shows the same sequence already being written down in the second millennium BCE alongside the abjad one. Two families of alphabet therefore inherited not only a set of signs but a disagreement about the order to recite them in, and Ge'ez is the only script still in daily use that keeps the southern answer.
In the Northwest Semitic scripts the letter answering to hoy took on a second job, standing at the end of a word for a vowel that had no sign of its own. Ge'ez never needed that expedient, because from the fourth century it marked its vowels on the consonant itself. Here hoy is a consonant and nothing more.
Haymanot, and the Word for What a Church Holds
Haymanot, the Ge'ez word for faith, begins with this letter in its fourth order. It is one of the words carrying most weight in Ethiopian religious speech, and it is used for the content of belief rather than for the act of believing: it names the doctrinal position a church holds rather than the trust an individual places in God. The word travelled outside Ethiopia in the twentieth century through Rastafari, where it came to name something different again, and the atlas keeps the two uses apart rather than letting the later one stand as a gloss on the older.
The same letter opens hagar, the ordinary word for a settled place or a country. What the letter does not carry is a meaning of its own. Ge'ez letters are not glossed the way Hebrew letters are, where aleph is an ox and beth a house and the tradition has built on those senses for centuries. A few Ge'ez names still show the inherited Semitic word behind them, bet and gaml and res among them, but for most of the fidel the name is a name and nothing further can honestly be said about it.
The atlas therefore leaves the meaning empty on most of these twenty-six rows. That is a statement about the evidence and not an oversight, and it is the reason a reader will find no table of Ge'ez letter symbolism here to set beside the Hebrew one.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Hoy and the Syriac he continue the Semitic plain h. Syriac is the other Semitic script still in daily liturgical use by an Oriental Orthodox communion, so this pair sets two living traditions beside one another rather than a living one beside a reconstruction.
Hoy and the Hebrew heh continue the Semitic plain h. Neither script borrowed the letter from the other. Ge'ez descends from the Ancient South Arabian script and Hebrew from the Phoenician, and the shared ancestor lies further back than either.
Sources
1. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996View the Source 2. Ancient Churches of Ethiopia: Fourth-Fourteenth Centuries
David W. Phillipson, Yale University Press, 2009
3. Ethiopia and the Bible (The Schweich Lectures 1967)
Edward Ullendorff, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1968View the Source 4. Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant: An Anthology
Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Peter Jeffery, A-R Editions, 1993
5. The Unicode Standard
Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)
Wolf Leslau, Otto Harrassowitz, 1987
Open Questions (1 open question)
Do the Ge'ez letter names carry a sense inside Ge'ez, or are they inherited forms only?
A few Ge'ez letter names are transparently words in the language: bet is a house, gaml is a camel, and the word behind res is the word for a head. Most are not, and several, nahas among them, resemble Ge'ez words closely enough to invite a gloss that nothing supports. The atlas records no meaning for those letters, which is a statement about the evidence and leaves open whether the Ethiopian tradition itself ever attached senses to them.
What would resolve this A survey of the Ge'ez grammatical and church-school literature for any indigenous account of the letter names, set against the comparative reconstruction of the Northwest Semitic names, would show whether an Ethiopian gloss tradition exists and what it says.
Ethiopian philology and the history of the traditional church schoolsDivinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition
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