Ge'ez, the Word That Names a Language, an Order and a Mode

Ge'ez, the name of the language this script was made for, begins with this letter, and the word does three jobs at once. It names the classical language of Aksum. It names the first of the seven vowel orders, the plain form a letter takes before any modification. And it names one of the three modes of the chant. A single Ge'ez word therefore turns up as a language, a column of a writing system and a musical mode, and the three uses are not usually distinguished in English writing about Ethiopia.

Where the word itself comes from is less settled. It has been connected with a root carrying the sense of being free or unmixed, which fits the use for the plain order of a letter, and it has been connected with the name of a people of the Aksumite region recorded in early sources. The two explanations are not exclusive and neither is established.

The language stopped being spoken as a mother tongue at some point in the first millennium and has been a learned and liturgical language ever since, which is a longer career as a dead language than most. It is read, chanted, composed in and taught, and a language that people still compose verse in extempore is dead only in a narrow sense of the word.