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Emotions, Morality, and Cognition: The Unprecedented Scope of the Concept of the Heart in Amharic

Summary

The article examines how Amharic conceptualizes the heart. Its central claim is that the noun ləbb covers far more ground than its counterparts in English, Polish or Russian. Besides feelings, the word also takes in moral character and cognition, so the European split between mind and heart does not map cleanly onto Amharic. The author combined three kinds of evidence:

  • seven dictionaries, monolingual, bilingual and Gəʿəz;
  • collocation patterns from the Amharic Web Corpus (amWaC);
  • a hand-gathered set of excerpts from news, music, literature and YouTube shows.

Etymology shows that the Gəʿəz forerunners of ləbb already leaned toward understanding and reasoning, while emotion was weakly represented there. In today's usage, ləbb can mean "mind" or "good sense" depending on context, and derived forms point toward intelligence and moral judgement. The concept also connects to God and to aʾǝməro "mind", which is not set against the heart. The study adds to the mapping of the Amharic worldview and to cross-linguistic research on how languages divide up the body.

Key points

  • Dictionaries:
    • AMC, the contemporary monolingual dictionary, plus Dästa Täklä Wäld.
    • Idiom coverage from Yäʾamarəñña fäliṭočč and Kane's Amharic–English Dictionary.
    • Gankin & Kaśa Gäbrä Ḥǝywät's Amharic–Russian dictionary.
    • Kidanä Wäld Kǝfle and Leslau for Gəʿəz etymology.
  • Corpus: amWaC is a web-crawled corpus of nearly 26 million words. It was used to extract collocations and to check which dictionary idioms are still in active use.
  • Kane's glosses: Kane renders ləbb with thirteen different English words or phrases, ranging from "belly" and "chest" to "courage", "intelligence" and "mind".
  • Gəʿəz derivatives: these include the verbs läbbäbä / läbbäwä ("understand, be clever, pay attention") and the noun ləbbuna ("wisdom, reason"). Modern Amharic has ləbbam and ləbbeñña, meaning "intelligent, attentive".
  • Body vocabulary: Amharic splits even the general notion of the body across three lexemes: akal, säwənnät and gäla.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Dictionary idioms were cross-checked against a large web corpus to separate living expressions from archaic ones, so the lexicon is weighted by actual use rather than lexicographic tradition — For Mova (world): idiom and multiword entries in the compiled knowledge layer could carry a corpus-attested "currency" flag, letting rare or archaic readings rank below live ones during interpretation.
  • I2. Bilingual glosses are treated as rough pointers, not true equivalents, and several dictionaries in different languages (English, Russian) are triangulated to pin down a sense — For Mova (back): when translating through the meta-world, a word should map to a meaning node with several candidate surface forms instead of a single fixed gloss.
  • I3. One lexeme can activate emotional, moral or cognitive readings depending on its surroundings, so its sense is resolved by context and collocates, not by the word alone — For Mova (frames): body-part and other polysemous nouns in idioms could be routed to emotion, character or cognition frames based on governing verbs and modifiers, keeping the choice explainable.
  • I4. Studying the whole derivational family of a root (verbs, adjectives, adverbs, abstract nouns) reveals the conceptual reach of the base word better than its own definitions do — For Mova (tokens): linking lemmas into derivational families in crate en would let a sense hint learned for one family member transfer to its relatives.
  • I5. The qualitative corpus deliberately mixes registers (news sites, song lyrics, literature, talk shows) to avoid a picture skewed by one genre — For Mova (learn): evaluation sets for frames and readers could be stratified by register, so a gain on news text is not mistaken for general improvement.

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

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Sentiment & emotion · Semitic languages

Institutions

🎓Adam Mickiewicz University in PoznańPoznan · Poland4 works · 1 034 citations

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.15460/aethiopica.27.2181

@inproceedings{kacprzak2025emotions,
  title = {{Emotions, Morality, and Cognition: The Unprecedented Scope of the Concept of the Heart in Amharic}},
  author = {Kacprzak, Aleksander},
  booktitle = {Aethiopica 27},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.15460/aethiopica.27.2181},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.15460/aethiopica.27.2181}
}

References

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