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A Short Note about some Useful Documents for Diachronical Studies of Non-Semitic Ethiopian Languages

Paper · 2012 · Alain Rouaud

Summary

Rouaud examines non-Semitic Ethiopian language material held in the Oriental Manuscripts Department of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. The holdings cover about thirty Cushitic, Omotic and other languages. Most of it comes from Antoine d'Abbadie, who was in Ethiopia from 1838 to 1848, and a small part from Casimir Mondon-Vidailhet. The author wants to know how much earlier scholars actually used these papers. That proved hard to establish, because later writers often drew on them without saying so. He describes the physical form of the papers, how d'Abbadie transcribed sounds, and how he compiled his word lists. He then traces how Carlo Conti Rossini mined the notebooks for several publications. His verdict on the two collections is sharply different. The Mondon-Vidailhet papers are copied study notes taken from other authors and have no research value. The d'Abbadie notebooks hold early, sometimes unique, data on languages whose speech communities may since have disappeared, so they remain valuable for historical and comparative linguistics.

Key points

  • Manuscript 185 is an Oromo–Amharic glossary of 320 words, published and translated by Conti Rossini in 1904. It is the only one of d'Abbadie's manuscripts that concerns a non-Semitic language. Everything else of linguistic value is in his private papers and travel notebooks.
  • The large-format volumes are clean copies of the small field notebooks. For example, the 58 Kamtiga proverbs in vol. 260 (ff. 426–431) also appear in notebook 274. Neither Chaîne nor Conti Rossini had noticed this.
  • d'Abbadie built his Oromo vocabulary in two steps:
    • he checked a base list with three interpreters;
    • he then enlarged it by about a third with a monolingual speaker from Enarea, reaching roughly 1,000 words.
  • Conti Rossini drew on the notebooks for work on Kemant, Mekan, Ginza, Gamella, Ghimirra and Haruro (Stella nos. 67, 76, 77, 97, 113). The Oromo, Saho and Somali material has been used least.
  • Mondon-Vidailhet's vols. 293, 296 and 297 are derivative. Their own labels credit Massaja, Halévy and Paulitschke, and one is a merchant's (Armand Savouré's) phrasebook. Rouaud judges them dispensable.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. d'Abbadie wrote down the things a language had no word for (no greeting, no lemon, no named weekdays except Saturday), which is evidence that ordinary lists silently drop.
  • I2. Rouaud found that some volumes are clean copies of other notebooks, which means the two are not independent sources.
  • I3. He sorts documents by labels such as "according to Massaja", which mark them as secondhand rather than original fieldwork.
  • I4. The vocabulary method has two stages: several bilingual interpreters cross-check a core list, then a monolingual speaker extends it.
  • I5. When the Ethiopic script lacked a sound, d'Abbadie made a new sign by modifying an existing letter, so the new sign stayed recognisably linked to its base.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (world): Store "known to be absent" as its own state, separate from "not mentioned", so the reader can tell a stated absence from missing information.
  • I2 (learn): Detect near-duplicate or copied sentences before counting witness agreement, so that copied data is not mistaken for corroboration.
  • I3 (learn): Tag every silver or teacher example with its origin and give less weight to examples derived from an existing resource than to independent evidence.
  • I4 (learn): Build seed data on items where several witnesses agree, then grow it with a single strong, native-style source and audit that growth separately.
  • I5 (tokens): Add fine-grained tags or features as marked subtypes of existing ones, so they can always be collapsed back to the standard inventory.

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

 Institutions

🔬Centre National de la Recherche ScientifiqueParis · France169 works · 62,488 citations🎓Institut National des Langues et Civilisations OrientalesParis · France5 works · 243 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 3,066 works

Cite

Cite as Alain Rouaud. 2012. A Short Note about some Useful Documents for Diachronical Studies of Non-Semitic Ethiopian Languages. Aethiopica 12.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.15460/aethiopica.12.1.100

@inproceedings{rouaud2012short,
  title = {{A Short Note about some Useful Documents for Diachronical Studies of Non-Semitic Ethiopian Languages}},
  author = {Alain Rouaud},
  booktitle = {Aethiopica 12},
  year = {2012},
  doi = {10.15460/aethiopica.12.1.100},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.15460/aethiopica.12.1.100}
}

References

24 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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