Alphabet Letters
Lawe (La) ለ
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
Lawe is the second letter of the Ge'ez fidel and writes a plain l. Like every letter of the script it appears in seven orders, whose traditional names are ge'ez, ka'eb, salis, rabi', hamis, sadis and sabi', and which carry the seven vowels of the classical language. The vowel is shown by modifying the base shape: a ring, a stroke on the side, a shortened leg, a lifted arm. That system is what separates Ge'ez from the consonant-only scripts of the rest of the Semitic family, and it appeared in the fourth century CE, in the era of the kingdom of Aksum, on a script that had until then written consonants alone.
Facts
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 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. Attributions
Associated Soundl 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script 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 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 Open Questions
Sense of the NameNot established for this letter's own name inside the Ge'ez tradition
Lawe's own description names no Semitic cognate and states no sense for its name, matching the Ge'ez-wide position recorded on Res's own entry. 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 PositionSecond 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
Lawe, and the Long Drift of a Letter Name
Lawe writes a plain l and continues a Semitic consonant that has come down unchanged into every branch of the family. Its cognates are the Hebrew lamed, the Syriac lamadh and the Arabic lam, and in the Northwest Semitic order all three sit twelfth. In the halehame order this letter is second, which is a fair measure of how far the two sequences diverge.
The Hebrew name lamed is transparent inside Hebrew. It is the ox-goad, and the letter is named acrophonically, for a word beginning with its own sound. The Ge'ez name lawe is not transparent inside Ge'ez. It is close enough to the inherited name to be recognisable as a relative of it and far enough from it that the sense has gone. This is the ordinary condition of the Ge'ez letter names: a handful still show their Semitic word plainly, and the rest have worn down into forms that comparative philologists can line up with the Northwest Semitic set but that a reader of Ge'ez would not take for words.
The distinction matters for how these rows are recorded. A meaning can be given for a Hebrew letter because the tradition gives one. For most Ge'ez letters none is given, because none is attested, and supplying one by working backwards from the Hebrew would be a reconstruction presented as a fact.
Lalibela, and Churches Cut Downwards Into Rock
Lalibela, the name of a king of the Zagwe dynasty and of the highland town that carries his name, begins with this letter in its fourth order. The eleven rock-hewn churches there are cut down into the living stone rather than built up from it. Trenches were dug around each block to free it from the rock, and the interior was then hollowed out, so that a church stands in a pit with its roof at ground level. The tradition attributes the whole group to the king.
David Phillipson's survey of Ethiopian church architecture sets them alongside the earlier Aksumite and Tigrayan rock churches and argues that they belong to a longer building history rather than to a single reign. The atlas follows the survey in treating the traditional attribution as tradition, which is not the same as treating it as false.
The site is not a ruin. The churches are in use, the liturgy is sung in Ge'ez in them, and at the great feasts the town fills with pilgrims. That is the ordinary condition of the things this script serves: the manuscripts are working books, the chant is a working repertory, and the language, although nobody speaks it at home, is read aloud somewhere in Ethiopia or Eritrea every day of the year. An account that treats Lalibela as an archaeological site is describing half of what is there.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Lawe and the Syriac lamadh continue the Semitic l. Syriac keeps the inherited abjad order, in which this letter stands twelfth; in the Ge'ez order it stands second.
Lawe and the Hebrew lamed continue the same Semitic l. The letter stands second in the Ge'ez order and twelfth in the Hebrew one, which is the clearest single measure of how far the South Semitic and abjad sequences diverge.
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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