Haymanot, and the Word for What a Church Holds

Haymanot, the Ge'ez word for faith, begins with this letter in its fourth order. It is one of the words carrying most weight in Ethiopian religious speech, and it is used for the content of belief rather than for the act of believing: it names the doctrinal position a church holds rather than the trust an individual places in God. The word travelled outside Ethiopia in the twentieth century through Rastafari, where it came to name something different again, and the atlas keeps the two uses apart rather than letting the later one stand as a gloss on the older.

The same letter opens hagar, the ordinary word for a settled place or a country. What the letter does not carry is a meaning of its own. Ge'ez letters are not glossed the way Hebrew letters are, where aleph is an ox and beth a house and the tradition has built on those senses for centuries. A few Ge'ez names still show the inherited Semitic word behind them, bet and gaml and res among them, but for most of the fidel the name is a name and nothing further can honestly be said about it.

The atlas therefore leaves the meaning empty on most of these twenty-six rows. That is a statement about the evidence and not an oversight, and it is the reason a reader will find no table of Ge'ez letter symbolism here to set beside the Hebrew one.