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Alphabet Letters

Sappa (Tza) ፀ

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

Sappa is the twenty-fourth letter of the Ge'ez fidel. The consonant it wrote in the classical language is reconstructed rather than heard: in the received reading tradition it is sounded exactly as saday is, and what it once represented is worked out by comparison with the other Semitic languages rather than from any Ethiopian testimony. Its name is not one of the transparently inherited ones. Sappa is a good illustration of how much of a classical language's sound is inference, and of why the atlas separates what a script's users do today from what comparative linguistics reconstructs behind it.

Facts
Attributions
Associated Sound
Reconstructed as a distinct emphatic; merged with saday in the received tradition 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script
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
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.
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
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
Open Questions
Sense of the Name
Not established for this letter's own name inside the Ge'ez tradition
Sappa's own description states outright that its name is "not one of the transparently inherited ones" and that even its classical sound is reconstructed by comparison rather than attested directly, naming genuine uncertainty rather than an unrecovered but real answer.
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-fourth 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
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
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
Learn More
Sappa, and the Consonant Arabic Is Named For

Sappa wrote an emphatic sibilant of a kind that has left the family almost everywhere. It is reconstructed as a lateral, made with the air passing over the sides of the tongue and with the emphatic articulation on top, and it is the hardest of the reconstructed Semitic consonants to describe in ordinary terms.

Arabic keeps it and writes it with dad, and Arabic speakers call their language the language of the dad on the strength of it, because the sound was held to be peculiar to Arabic among the languages its speakers knew. Ge'ez kept it too, as this letter. Hebrew and Syriac merged it into their single emphatic sibilant before their alphabets were fixed, so those scripts have no sign for it at all and the relation recorded here from sappa to the Hebrew tzaddi is a relation to the letter that absorbed the sound rather than to an equivalent of it.

In the Ethiopian reading tradition sappa and saday are now sounded alike, so what this letter once represented is reconstructed rather than heard. It is a good illustration of how much of a classical language's sound is inference, and of why the atlas separates what a script's users do today from what comparative work reconstructs behind them.

Tsehay, the Sun, and a Calendar of Thirteen Months

Tsehay, the Ge'ez and Amharic word for the sun, is spelled with this letter, and the sun is the thing the Ethiopian calendar is built on. The year has twelve months of thirty days and a thirteenth short month, Pagume, of five days or six in a leap year. The new year falls in September, and the Ethiopian year number runs seven or eight behind the Gregorian one, the difference depending on the point in the year, because the two traditions calculated the date of the Incarnation differently.

The calculation of the calendar is a discipline in its own right in the church schools. It is called bahre hasab, and it fixes the movable feasts, chiefly the date of Fasika, by rules learned as part of the traditional curriculum rather than looked up. A student who has taken that stage can work out the calendar for any year.

The Ethiopian tradition also preserves the Book of Enoch, which contains a solar calendar of its own, and the relation between that calendar and the one actually kept is a real scholarly question rather than an obvious identity. The atlas records the calendar in use, records the book, and does not run a line between them that the sources do not support.

The month names deserve a note of their own. They are not the Julian or Gregorian ones, and several are Ge'ez words with senses of their own, so a date written in Ethiopian style is not a translation of a Western date but a reading taken from a different system. Converting between the two is arithmetic rather than substitution, and getting it wrong by a day is easy.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Related To

Dad ض, Alphabet Letters

Arabic dad and Ge'ez sappa both keep the emphatic lateral sibilant that Hebrew and Syriac merged into their single emphatic s. Arabic speakers call their language the language of the dad after this consonant.

Source The Semitic Languages of Ethiopia: A Comparative PhonologyEdward Ullendorff
Sadhe ܨ, Alphabet Letters

Sappa wrote a second emphatic sibilant that Syriac had merged into sadhe before its alphabet was fixed. Arabic keeps the same consonant as dad, so the relation here is to the absorbing letter rather than to an equivalent.

Source The World's Writing SystemsPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.)
Tzaddi צ, Alphabet Letters

Sappa wrote a second emphatic sibilant that Hebrew had merged into tzaddi before its alphabet was fixed. Arabic keeps the same consonant as dad, so the relation here is to the letter that absorbed the sound rather than to an equivalent.

Source Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)Wolf Leslau
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
Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)
Wolf Leslau, Otto Harrassowitz, 1987
The Semitic Languages of Ethiopia: A Comparative Phonology
Edward Ullendorff, Taylor's (Foreign) Press, 1955
Open Questions (2 open questions)
What consonant did the Ge'ez letter sappa write in the classical language?

In the received reading tradition of the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches sappa is sounded exactly as saday is, so the classical value is not recoverable from how the script is read today, and it is reconstructed by comparison with the other Semitic languages rather than from any Ethiopian testimony.

What would resolve this A transcription of Ge'ez words into a contemporary script that did distinguish the sounds, or an Aksumite-period bilingual or transcribed text in which the letter's value can be read off directly.
Semitic historical linguistics; Ethiopian epigraphyDivinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition
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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View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.