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Alphabet Letters

Payt (Pha) ጰ

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

Payt is the twenty-second letter of the Ge'ez fidel and writes an ejective p. It is one of two p letters in the fidel, with psa at the end of the order, and the presence of both is worth noting because the Northwest Semitic alphabets have only one p letter and no ejective one. Where the two Ge'ez p letters came from is a question about the script's contacts rather than about its inheritance, and the atlas does not settle it. What is clear is that they stand at points in the order where later additions would be expected rather than among the earliest letters.

Facts
Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural Role
The 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
Transmission
Manuscript Tradition
Ge'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 Source
Why 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 Sound
An ejective p 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
Ge'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 Source
Written 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
Open Questions
Historical Origin
Payt writes an ejective p with no Semitic ancestor. It is usually explained as tayt altered, on the resemblance of the two forms and payt's late position in the order, but that explanation is an inference from shapes and competes with an account deriving both Ge'ez p letters from Greek.
Neither the tayt-modification reading nor the Greek-origin reading rests on a document; no palaeographic sequence for payt and tayt from dated Aksumite material has yet shown whether the earliest forms of payt resemble tayt more closely than the later ones do.
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name inside the Ge'ez tradition
Payt's own description discusses the fidel's two p letters and their unclear origin rather than the name's ancestry, and states no cognate or sense.
Identity
Script Type
An 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
Position
Twenty-second 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 Joins
The letters do not join, and the script runs left to right, unlike every other Semitic script of comparable age 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script
Origins
Origin Period
Descends 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 Origin
The kingdom of Aksum, in the northern highlands of what are now Ethiopia and Eritrea 2Tradition: The Ge'ez script
Origin of the Name
The 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
Use
Ritual Use
Read, 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
Learn More
Payt, a Sound the Family Did Not Have

Payt writes an ejective p, and there is no Semitic consonant behind it. Proto-Semitic had a plain p, which Ge'ez turned into f, and it had no p of any kind at the ejective series where b, d, g, z, k and t all have partners. The labial column of the inventory is the one place where the pattern that organises the rest of the fidel simply stops.

So the presence of two p letters at the end of the Ge'ez order, payt and psa, is something the inheritance cannot account for. Both stand late in the sequence, which is where added letters usually stand, and the sound they write is marginal in the classical language, occurring chiefly in names and words taken from Greek.

Where they came from is not settled. Payt has been explained as a sign made by modifying tayt, on the resemblance of the two shapes, and psa has been explained as a borrowing of the Greek pi. Neither explanation rests on a document; both are readings of the letterforms and of the order. The atlas records the relation between payt and tayt as debated for exactly that reason, and carries an open question naming what evidence would settle it. Recording the argument is worth more here than choosing a side of it.

The atlas therefore records twenty-six letters and describes four of them as additions: two inherited from a South Arabian inventory richer than the Northwest Semitic one, and two supplied later for a sound the language had lost. That is a more informative statement than the count on its own, and it is available only because the order preserves the sequence in which the letters arrived.

Pawlos, Petros, and Letters Made for Foreign Names

Pawlos, the Ge'ez form of Paul, begins with this letter, and Petros, the form of Peter, begins with it in the fifth order. The two most frequently named apostles of the New Testament both have names that a Ge'ez writer could not spell with an inherited letter, because the language had turned every Semitic p into f before those names arrived.

A language in that position has three options. It can substitute the nearest sound it has, which is what happened to the Greek pascha when it became the Ethiopian Fasika, spelled with af. It can leave the word out. Or it can add a letter. Ge'ez did the first for some words and the third for others, and the result is a small inconsistency in the lexicon that is a fossil of the moment the Greek text arrived.

Payt therefore belongs to the same layer of the language as wengel and the rest of the Greek Christian vocabulary. It is a letter that exists because a body of foreign names had to be written down accurately in a script that had no sign for the sound in them, and the fact that it was added rather than avoided says something about how carefully the names were being handled.

The lectionary is the reason it mattered. Readings from the epistles are appointed through the year, and a name standing in the rubric of a service every week has to have a settled spelling. A letter added for a handful of proper names is a letter added because those names are read aloud constantly, in front of a congregation, by someone who cannot improvise.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Related To

Psa (Pa) ፐ, Alphabet Letters

Psa and payt are the two p letters of the fidel, both standing at the end of the order and both writing a sound the Semitic inheritance did not supply. Payt writes the ejective and psa the plain stop.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Tayt (Tha) ጠ, Alphabet Letters

Why this is disputed. Payt, the ejective p, is generally explained as a sign made by modifying tayt to write a sound the Semitic inheritance did not supply. Which existing sign was modified, and at what point in the script's development the new letter was added rather than being present from the start, is argued from the surviving inscriptional evidence rather than settled by it.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
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
The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode ConsortiumView the Source
Open Questions (2 open questions)
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
Is the Ge'ez letter payt a modification of tayt?

Payt writes an ejective p, which has no Semitic ancestor. It is usually explained as a sign made by altering tayt, on the resemblance of the two forms and on the position of payt late in the order, but the explanation is an inference from shapes rather than a documented act, and it competes with an account deriving both Ge'ez p letters from Greek.

What would resolve this A palaeographic sequence for both letters from dated Aksumite material, showing whether the earliest forms of payt resemble tayt more closely than the later ones do, would test the derivation directly.
Ethiopian epigraphy and Semitic palaeographyPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems
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