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Word Order in Epigraphic Gǝ’ǝz

Paper · 2013 · Maria Bulakh

Summary

Grammars of Gǝ’ǝz usually describe its neutral clause order as verb–subject–object, but they support this with a handful of hand-picked examples. Nobody had systematically examined the inscriptions, even though these Aksumite-era texts from Eritrea, northern Ethiopia, Sudan and Yemen (first millennium A.D.) are the only surviving Gǝ’ǝz writings composed by native speakers that reach us unaltered by translation or copying. Bulakh collects every analysable clause in the inscriptional corpus, cited mainly from RIÉ. She sorts out unreliable readings and checks the epigraphic picture against Classical Gǝ’ǝz. Her conclusion is that the early language is a typical right-branching Semitic language. Objects and prepositional phrases usually come after the verb, and relative clauses and genitive complements usually come after their head noun. She also finds some divergences from the Classical language, most notably in how numerals behave. The study matters because it rests on a small but authentic body of evidence. It also shows how fragmentary sources can be handled carefully enough to test claims about word order.

Key points

  • The dataset has 276 sentences with transitive or intransitive verbs or verbal copulas. Of these, 32 come from duplicate inscriptions and 57 are marked as doubtful with several possible readings.
  • Earlier claims tested include VSO from Dillmann, Gragg and Weninger, and Tropper's more specific V–S–O–A order with adverbials last.
  • Damaged context and unclear sentence boundaries often make the analysis uncertain. In the Anza inscription (RIÉ 218), for example, scholars have proposed several competing ways to divide the clauses.
  • The main result is a right-branching profile that agrees with Classical Gǝ’ǝz, with numerals as the most notable point of difference.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Doubtful examples are kept in the study but explicitly marked as uncertain, rather than being dropped or forced into one reading. Counts can then be reported with and without the shaky cases.
  • I2. Duplicate inscriptions are counted but always labelled as duplicates. When copies of one text differ in arrangement, that variation is itself evidence, and when they agree, the agreement is informative too.
  • I3. A claim is accepted only when two independent bodies of evidence (inscriptions and manuscripts) point the same way, since each source has its own distortions.
  • I4. For an ambiguous passage, the paper lists every plausible clause division and role assignment explicitly, then lowers the evidential weight of that passage.
  • I5. Clause structure can sometimes be read reliably even when a word's meaning is unknown, because its position and form reveal its function.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Silver trees on which witness parsers disagree could carry a "dubious" tag, so evaluation reports scores both with and without them.
  • I2 (learn): Paraphrases or repeated sentences in training data should be tracked as linked groups, and their structural variants used as a signal of where the parser is consistent.
  • I3 (learn): This supports building silver data from parsers that are truly independent and treating their agreement as the gate for acceptance.
  • I4 (tree): The parser could output a small explicit set of alternative segmentations or attachments with a reduced confidence, instead of silently committing to one.
  • I5 (tokens): Unknown verbs could be tagged from morphology and position alone, and their lemma left unresolved without blocking the parse.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

Cite

Cite as Maria Bulakh. 2013. Word Order in Epigraphic Gǝ’ǝz. Aethiopica 15.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.15460/aethiopica.15.1.664

@inproceedings{bulakh2013word,
  title = {{Word Order in Epigraphic Gǝ’ǝz}},
  author = {Maria Bulakh},
  booktitle = {Aethiopica 15},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.15460/aethiopica.15.1.664},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.15460/aethiopica.15.1.664}
}

References

31 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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