Emigrants, as were beyond doubt the earliest settlers in E., from the other side of the Arabian isthmus, it is but natural that the structure of their language, as well as that of their own bodies, should bear traces of their Shemitic origin. The reason of this emigration is contained in the very name of this language, which is called Geer— free, affording a most striking parallel to the designation Franc—French. Free places of habitation were what they came in search of. The name Ethiopian, or, as they call it, Ithiopjawan, they adopted from the Greeks at a very late period. This their oldest language, Leshana Geez, was suppressed by a royal decree of Ikon-Amlak, in the 14th c., and the Amharic adopted as the court language. Ever since, it has, with exception of the province of Tigre, where it is still spoken (with slight idiomatic changes), remained the Le,shana, hfazhaf, the language of books and of the church. It is exclusively used in writing, even of ordinary letters, and the educated alone understand it. Its general structure conies as close to that of the Arabic as a dialect can and must. A great many of its words are still classical Arabic; others resemble more the Hebrew and its two Chaldee dialects, the Aramaic and Syriac; others, again, belong to African dialects; and many, as the names of the months, are Greek. It has 26 letters, 22 of which bear the ancient Shemitic stamp, and exhibit the greatest likeness to the Phenician, the com mon original alphabet; and seven vowels, including a very short e, wide]] sounds pre cisely like the Hebrew Sch6wa. These vowels are represented by little hooks, and remain inseparably attached to their respective letters; and as the Geez, unlike all its sister-languages, is never written without vowels, the alphabet becomes a syllabary with 182 characters. Another difference exists in its being written from left to right—a cir cumstance from which some have concluded that the Greeks introduced writing in E. ; forgetting, in the first place, that Greek itself was frequently written from rig-lit to left, and that`Zend, certain cimeiferms, hieroglyphs, etc., are likewise written from left to right. We cannot enter here into the grammatical minutim of the language; we will only mention that out of the ten conjugations, eight are Arabic; that there is a double infinitive, but no participle and no dual; that the formation of the so-called plural, and of declension generally, point to that very remote period when the Hebrew and Arabic made use Of the same grammatical processes. There are no diacritical marks employed in writing; the letters are not combined, and the words are separated by two dots.
Although there can be no doubt of the existence of a rich literature in a flourishing country like E. anterior to Christ, still, owing both to frequent internal convulsions, and the misguided zeal of the early Christian missionaries, who here and elsewhere con sidered it their first duty to destroy all the ancient records of which they could get hold, nothing but a few half-erased inscriptions have survived. The earliest existing docu ment of post-Christian literature is a complete translation of the Bible, probably by Fru mentius. See FRUMENTIUS. The Old Testament, probably a translation from the Alexandrine version of the LXX., consists of four parts: 1, the Law or Octateuchos (five books of Moses, Joshua, Judges, Ruth); 2, Kings; 3, Solomon; 4, Prophets, and two books of the Maccabees. The New Testament consists of-1, Gospels; 2, Acts; 3, Paulus; 4, Apostolus. A very peculiar book, Henoch, belongs also to the literature of
the Old Testament. See ENOCH. The New Testament comprises likewise another book, Senodas, containing the pseudo-Clementine or apostolical constitutions. The Ethiopians have a liturgy (Kanon Kedaso—Holy Kanon) and a symbolico-dogmatical work (Hama nota Abau—Belief of the Fathers), containing portions of homilies of the Greek fathers, Athanasius, Basil the great, Chrysostom, Cyril, Gregory of Nyssa and Nazianzen. Besides these, they have martyrologies, called Synaxar. They employ in this their sacred literature a peculiar kind of rhythm without a distinct meter. Any number of rhyming lines forms a stanza, without reference to the number of words constituting the verse, or of verses constituting the stanza. They also use certain phrases as a refrain—not unlike the manner of the medifeval Hebrew Pizmon. See Jimisit LITURGY. As to general literature, they have neither a written book of laws, nor a grammar of their own language, nor, in fact, anything worth mentioning, except a (,hronicle of Azum, and Chronicles of Abyssinia. ,,They ,are fond, however of wise saws, and the like, so fascinating to the eastern mind. They have a dictionary, but most of its explanations and translations are utterly wrong. No wonder the learned in Europe should have been sorely puzzled by such a language, and that they should, after long consideration, have pronounced it to be either " Chaldee" or " Indian," while Bruce held it to be the language of Adam and Eve. Potgen, a Cologne church-provost, hap pening to be at Rome at the beginning of the 16th c., there made the acquaintance of native Ethiopians, and became the first to enlighten the world on the nature of this occult language. After him came the Carmelite Jacob 3Iarianus Victorius, from Reate, who wrote Institutiones Linguce Chaldace S. 2Ethiop. (Rome, 1548), an entirely worthless book; then Wemniers, who in 1683 published an Ethiopian grammar and dictionary. The principal investigator, however, is Hiob Ludolf from Gotha. who, aided by the Abba Gregorius, before mentioned, and supported by his own extraordinary linguistic talents and indomitable energy, acquired such a power over this language, that notwith standing the number of eminent Orientalists, such as Platt, Lawrence, Dorn, Hupfeld, Hoffmann, Roediger, Ewald, Isenberg, Blumenbach, etc., who have since worked in this field, his books, as re-edited by Dillmann, still bold the first place. It is hardly nec essary to add, that the Ethiopian is one of the most important and indispensable lan guages to the Shemitic scholar, containing as it does a great many words and forms of a date anterior to the separation of the different Shemitic dialects. Among the most important Ethiopian books printed in Europe are the Psalms, edited with a Latin trans lation by Ludolf (Frankfort, 1701); the New Testament, in two volumes (Rome, 1548); the book of Henoch (Lond. 1840); Ascend° Isaiac Vatis, with a Latin translation by Law rence (Oxford, 1819); Didasealia, or apostolical constitution of the Abyssinian church (Lond. 1834).—Ludolf's works are Grammatica .1Ethiopica (Lbrid. 1661; new ed. by Dillmann, 1857); Lexicon YE'thiopieum (Frankfort, 1699); new ed., 1862); ITistoria _zEthi opica (1681). Since the English expedition to Abyssinia, the British museum possesses a larger number of Ethiopic MSS. than any other library.