Alphabet Letters
Sawt (Sza) ሠ
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
Sawt is the fifth letter of the Ge'ez fidel. In the classical language it wrote a sibilant distinct from the s of sat, but the two have merged in the received reading tradition and both are sounded s. The pairs that have merged in this way, sawt with sat, hawt and harm with hoy, ayn with alf, and sappa with saday, are among the reasons the fidel has twenty-six letters where the sounds a modern reader distinguishes are fewer. They are kept because the spelling of the classical texts is fixed, and because the liturgy is chanted from those texts rather than from a modernised orthography.
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 SoundHistorically a distinct sibilant; read as s in the received tradition 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
Sawt's own description discusses only its merged pronunciation with sat and names no cognate or sense for its name. 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 PositionFifth 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
Sawt, and a Sound Reconstructed as a Lateral
Sawt is the first of the two plain s letters of the fidel, and the consonant it wrote in the classical language is among the most argued-over in Semitic linguistics. Proto-Semitic is reconstructed with three separate sibilants where most of its daughters have fewer, and this letter carries the one conventionally transcribed with an acute accent, which several lines of evidence suggest was not a hissing sound at all but a lateral, made with the air escaping over the sides of the tongue.
The cognate sets run as follows. Hebrew has no separate sign for it and writes it with the shin, distinguished in pointed texts by a dot on the left rather than the right. Syriac merged it likewise. Arabic keeps it distinct as shin. Ge'ez keeps it distinct as this letter. So the alphabets that preserved the three-way distinction and the alphabets that collapsed it do not line up with each other, and any statement of which Ge'ez letter answers to which Hebrew one has to say which correspondence it means.
The atlas records the relation from sawt to the Hebrew shin as debated for that reason. The relation is real, but it is a relation to one of two values that the Hebrew letter carries, and stating it flatly would hide the argument rather than report it.
Selassie, the Trinity, and a Name Read Around the World
Selassie, the Ge'ez word for the Trinity, begins with this letter in its third order, and the spelling is one of the places where the difference between the two s letters is doing real work. A word spelled with sawt is spelled that way because the classical text spelled it that way, and since the reading tradition sounds both letters alike a scribe cannot hear which one a word takes. It has to be known.
The word reached far beyond the church that uses it. Haile Selassie, the regnal name of the last emperor of Ethiopia, means the power of the Trinity, and it is compounded from hayl, power, which begins with harm, and this word. Through the emperor the name became the central term of Rastafari, a movement that grew in Jamaica from the 1930s and that reads him in a way the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church does not. The atlas records both and lets neither stand as a gloss on the other. What the church means by Selassie is the doctrine of the Trinity. What Rastafari made of the emperor who bore the name is a separate matter with a history of its own.
Two letters of the fidel therefore open the two halves of one of the most widely recognised names of the twentieth century, and neither is pronounced today as the classical language pronounced it.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Why this is disputed. Sawt and the Syriac shin answer to the same reconstructed Semitic sibilant. Whether that correspondence reflects direct inheritance or a later realignment of the Ge'ez sign to match a neighboring script's value is argued from comparative evidence rather than settled by it.
Why this is disputed. Sawt and the Hebrew shin, in its left dotted reading, answer to the same reconstructed Semitic sibilant, which several lines of evidence make a lateral rather than a hiss. Reconstructing that sibilant's exact original sound, and whether Ge'ez sawt and the Hebrew left dotted shin diverged from it independently or through a shared intermediate stage, remains debated among specialists in comparative Semitic phonology.
Arabic shin and Ge'ez sawt answer to the same reconstructed Semitic sibilant, and both kept it as a letter of its own where the Northwest Semitic scripts did not. The Arabic pairing is cleaner than the Hebrew one because Arabic did not have to write two values with one sign.
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
The Semitic Languages of Ethiopia: A Comparative Phonology
Edward Ullendorff, Taylor's (Foreign) Press, 1955
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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