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.