The Gafat language is an extinct
Ethio-Semitic language once spoken by the
Gafat people along the
Blue Nile
The Blue Nile is a river originating at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. It travels for approximately through Ethiopia and Sudan. Along with the White Nile, it is one of the two major Tributary, tributaries of the Nile and supplies about 85.6% of the wa ...
in
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...
, and later, speakers pushed south of
Gojjam in what is now
East Welega Zone. Gafat was related to the
Harari language
Harari is an Ethio-Semitic language spoken by the Harari people of Ethiopia. Old Harari is a literary language of the city of Harar, a central hub of Islam in the Horn of Africa. According to the 2007 Ethiopian census, it is spoken by 25,810 pe ...
and Eastern
Gurage languages. The records of this language are extremely sparse. There is a translation of the
Song of Songs
The Song of Songs (), also called the Canticle of Canticles or the Song of Solomon, is a Biblical poetry, biblical poem, one of the five ("scrolls") in the ('writings'), the last section of the Tanakh. Unlike other books in the Hebrew Bible, i ...
written in the 17th or 18th Century held at the
Bodleian Library
The Bodleian Library () is the main research library of the University of Oxford. Founded in 1602 by Sir Thomas Bodley, it is one of the oldest libraries in Europe. With over 13 million printed items, it is the second-largest library in ...
.
Charles Tilstone Beke collected a word list in the early 1840s with difficulty from the few who knew the language, having found that "the rising generation seem to be altogether ignorant of it; and those grown-up persons who profess to speak it are anything but familiar with it." The most recent accounts of this language are the reports of
Wolf Leslau, who visited the region in 1947 and after considerable work was able to find a total of four people who could still speak the language.
Edward Ullendorff, in his brief exposition on Gafat, concludes that as of the time of his writing, "one may ... expect that it has now virtually breathed its last."
[Ullendorff, Edward. ''The Ethiopians: An Introduction to Country and People, Second Edition'' (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 131.]
Notes
Bibliography
*
Adelung, Johann Christoph. (1812). ''Mithridates, oder allgemeine Sprachkunde''. Berlin.
ol. 3, p. 124–125: the same page from the Gafat text of the Song of Songs as in Bruce 1804 below
*
Beke, Charles Tilstone. (1846). "On the Languages and Dialects of Abyssinia and the Countries to the South", in: ''Proceedings of the Philological Society'' 2 (London), pp. 89–107.
*
Bruce, James. (1804). ''
Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 and 1773''. 2nd ed. Edinburgh.
ol. 2, pp. 491–499: "Vocabulary of the Amharic, Falashan, Gafat, Agow and Tcheretch Agow Languages"; vol. 7, plate III: a page from the Gafat text of the Song of Songs
*
Leslau, Wolf (1944), "The Position of Gafat in Ethiopic", in ''Language'' 20, pp. 56–65.
* Leslau, Wolf. (1945). ''Gafat Documents: Records of a South-Ethiopic Language''. American Oriental Series, no. 28. New Haven.
* Leslau, Wolf. (1956). ''Etudes descriptive et comparative du gafat (éthiopien méridional)''. Paris: C. Klincksieck.
*
Ludolf, Hiob, ''Historia Aethiopica''. Francofurti ad Moenum.
here are 3 sentences in Gafat with Latin translation in chapter 10, §60
* Franz Praetorius. (1879). ''Die amharische Sprache''. Halle. pp. 13–14.
External links
Gafat Documents: Records of a South Ethiopic Language (1945) by Leslau
Extinct languages of Africa
Languages of Ethiopia
Semitic languages
{{Semitic-lang-stub