Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2023 / Amharic Folkloric Oral Traditions: Collections for Insiders and for Outsiders

Amharic Folkloric Oral Traditions: Collections for Insiders and for Outsiders

Summary

This review article by Bitania Ze'amanuel and Peter Unseth (Aethiopica 25) assesses three recent self-published books that document Amharic folklore. Two are proverb collections: Daniel Aberra's large second edition and a smaller book by Fisseha G. Demoze and William H. Armstrong. The third is Daniel Aberra's collection of riddles. The reviewers use "oral tradition" in the folklorist's sense of proverbs, riddles and stories, not in the sense historians give it. They contrast collections made for native users with those that also serve outside readers. They describe what proverbs and riddles do in Ethiopian life. Proverbs teach norms and run through ordinary talk. Riddles teach children and serve as a group game. The reviewers conclude that all three books build on earlier work, add many new examples and bring methodological innovations. One example is a new way of laying out riddles alongside their answers. The books give folklorists organized data for testing theories, and they could serve as templates for documenting other languages of the Horn and beyond.

Key points

  • The three books reviewed are Daniel Aberra's Amharic proverbs (2nd edn, 2012 EC = 2019/2020 CE, 639 pp), Fisseha G. Demoze & William H. Armstrong's Ethiopian Amharic Proverbs (Washington DC, 2019, 115 pp) and Daniel Aberra's Riddles in Amharic (109 pp).
  • Daniel Aberra's proverb book contains more than seventy proverbs that open with ንጉሥ ('king'). This makes the collection usable for checking which proverbs are still familiar today.
  • Endalew Assefa (2015) classified some traditional Amharic proverbs as expressing a low view of women. The reviewers propose testing whether young speakers still know and use such proverbs.
  • The riddle book introduces a new arrangement of riddles and answers that is meant to ease study and analysis.
  • Proverbs and riddles are presented as carriers of identity, values, history and worldview. They matter to the community itself, to foreigners, and to a younger generation influenced by globalization.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Grouping proverbs by a shared head word, as with the seventy-plus "king" proverbs, turns a book of sayings into a set of near-parallel items that can be studied side by side. — For Mova (frames): Groups of figurative sentences sharing one key noun could test whether the implicature layer separates literal from proverbial readings, while the head word stays constant.
  • I2. A historical collection can be validated by checking whether today's speakers still recognize and use its items, so the resource gets a live usage check instead of being trusted as is. — For Mova (learn): Compiled knowledge such as idioms or verb senses could be audited against current corpora, and entries that never occur in modern text could be flagged as archaic instead of silently used.
  • I3. The way riddles are paired with their answers is itself a design decision that determines what kinds of analysis are possible later. — For Mova (answer): Riddle- or fable-style QA data should store the prompt, the answer and the link between them as explicit structure, so a wrong answer can be traced to the step that failed.
  • I4. The reviewers separate two senses of the same term ("oral tradition" for folklorists versus historians) before using it. — For Mova (world): Ontology entries drawn from WordNet/FrameNet/Wikidata should keep field-specific senses distinct, so a term borrowed from one discipline does not merge with another discipline's meaning.
  • I5. The reviewers distinguish collections made for insiders from those made for outsiders, recognizing that the same content needs different framing for different readers. — For Mova (back): Generation from the meaning graph could take a reader-model parameter, adding background explanation for outsiders and omitting it for readers who already share the cultural context.

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

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{unseth2023amharic,
  title = {{Amharic Folkloric Oral Traditions: Collections for Insiders and for Outsiders}},
  author = {Unseth, Peter and Bitania},
  booktitle = {Aethiopica 25},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.15460/aethiopica.25.0.1563},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.15460/aethiopica.25.0.1563}
}

References

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

  1. Afäwärq Taräqäñ 2015/2016. አንጋረ ምሳሌ ዘግእዝ። (Angarä mǝsale zägǝʾǝz, ‘Gǝʿǝz proverbial sayings’) (n.p.: n.pub., 2008 EC = 2015/2016 CE ). find
  2. Aethiopica 25 (2022) Review Article Aregga Hailemichael 2006. ‘The role of the camel in Afar oral traditions: An ethnolinguistic approach’, ልሳን . Lissan, 20/1–2 (2006 = Special issue dedicated to Renate Richter on the occasions of her 65 th birthday), 15–30. find
  3. Baeteman, J. 1929. Dictionnaire amarigna–français, suivi d’un vocabulaire français– amarigna (Dire-Daoua: Imprimerie Saint Lazare, 1929). Däbbäbä Ḫaylägiyorgis Ǝngǝda 2006/2007. አዲሱ የምሳሌያዊ አነጋገሮች መጽሐፍ (Addisu yämǝsaleyawi annägagäročč mäṣḥaf, ‘The new book of parables’) (n.p.: Aster Nega Publishing Enterprise, 1999 EC = 2006/2007 CE ). Davies, M. 2014. ‘Oedipus and the Riddle of the Sphinx’, Trends in Classics, 6/2 (2014 = Special Issue: Theban Resonances in Homeric Epic), 431–436. find
  4. Dejene Gemechu 2014. ‘Oral Text in Cultural and Natural Context: Riddles among the Walisoo Liiban Oromo’, Ethiopian Journal of Social Sciences and Language Studies, 1/1 (2014), 41–62. find
  5. Endalew Assefa 2015. ‘Linguistic Violence against Women as Manifested in Sexist Amharic Proverbs’, Ethnorêma, 11 (2015), 67–94. find
  6. Fitsum Abate 2014. ‘Documentation and description of unheard voices: k’aʔanniʃe and ɗenke of the Ganjule’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 26/1 (2014), 116–125. find
  7. Jeylan W. Hussein 2004. ‘A Cultural Representation of Women in the Oromo Society’, African Study Monographs, 25/3 (2004), 103–147. find
  8. Jordan, A. C. 1958. ‘Towards an African literature III: Riddles and Proverbs’, Africa South, 2/2 (1958), 101–104. find
  9. Leslau, W. 1965. ‘Chaha Riddles’, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici, 21 (1965, pub. 1966), 27–93. — 1967–1968. ‘Eža Riddles’, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici, 23 (1967–1968, pub. 1969), 43–78. — 1982–1983. ‘Harari Riddles’, Rassegna di Studi Etiopici, 29 (1982–1983), 39–85. find
  10. Meckelburg, A., S. Dege-Müller, and D. Bustorf 2018. Oral Traditions in Ethiopian Studies, eds, Supplement to Aethiopica, 7 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018). find
  11. Meyer, R. 2005. ‘Riddles as Indicator of Cultural and Linguistic Convergence in the Gurage Region’, Scrinium, 1 (2005 = D. Nosnitsin, in collaboration with S. Frantsouzoff, L. Kogan, and B. Lourié, eds, Varia Aethiopica: In Memory of Sevir B. Chernetsov (1943– 2005) (Saint Petersburg: Byzantinorossica, 2005)), 174–196. find
  12. Mieder, W. 1987. Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987). find
  13. Mittwoch, E. 1942. ‘Popular Amharic Texts’, Journal of the Royal African Society, 41/165 (1942), 261–267. Mogäs ʿƎqubä Giyorgis 1966/1967. ጥንታዊ ምሳሌ ( በዐማርኛ ) (Ṭǝntawi mǝsale (bäʿamarǝñña), ‘Ancient image (in Amharic)’) (Asmära: Mahbärä ḫawaryat mattämiya bet, 1959 EC = 1966/1967 CE ). Shashetu Bayu Tizazu and Kamil Nuredin Awol 2019. ‘The Form and Structure of Gurage Riddles: A Case of Cheha Gurage Riddles’, International Journal of English, Literature and Culture, 7/9 (2019), 1–6. find
  14. Tadesse Jaleta Jirata 2012. ‘Learning through Play: An Ethnographic Study of Children’s Riddling in Ethiopia’, Africa, 82/2 (2012), 272–286. find
  15. Aethiopica 25 (2022) Bitania Ze’amanuel and Peter Unseth Tekletsadik Belachew 2021. ‘Wax and Gold: Wisdom, Spirituality and Moral Discourse in Ethiopian Proverbs’, in F. B. Nyamnjoh, P. Nwosu, and H. M. Yosimbom, eds, Being and Becoming African as a Permanent Work in Progress: Inspiration from Chinua Achebe’s Proverbs (Bamenda: Langaa Research & Publishing Common Initiative Group, 2021), 137–178. find
  16. Unseth, P. 2020. ‘African Dialogue Proverbs: An Initial Study of Their Distribution and Forms’, Journal of Language, Culture, and Religion, 1/2 (2020), 19–32. Summary find

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/unseth-2023-amharic-folkloric-oral-traditions-collections/