Alphabet Letters
Harm (Xa) ኀ
Ge'ez Letters
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Origin Descends from the Ancient South Arabian script; the vocalised seven-order form appears on Aksumite inscriptions of the fourth century CE
Harm is the eleventh letter of the Ge'ez fidel. In the classical language it wrote a velar fricative, the sound of the ch in Scottish loch, distinct from both hoy and hawt; in the received reading tradition all three are sounded h. Harm is the third of the merged h letters and the one most often mentioned when the fidel's redundancies are discussed. Like qaf and kaf it also heads a labiovelar series in the character standard. The atlas counts only the plain letter among the twenty-six, and notes the labiovelars as an extension of the grid rather than as separate members of the alphabet.
Facts
Transmission
Manuscript TraditionGe'ez scripture and liturgical books are copied by hand on parchment and bound between wooden boards, a practice that has continued without interruption 3Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity Disputed
Meaning in the Attesting SourceWhy the script was vocalised in the fourth century CE, after centuries of writing consonants alone, is argued and not settled 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) reviews the Aksumite inscriptions that first show Ge'ez written with vocalisation, a fourth-century CE innovation that is not in dispute, and canvasses three explanations for why it happened then: an internal development inside the Aksumite royal chancery seeking a more precise script for administration; a response to the newly Christian court's need for scripture translated and taught with unambiguous vowels after Aksum's conversion under King Ezana; and influence carried by vocalised Indian scripts reaching the Aksumite court through Red Sea trade contact. Comparing the timing, the epigraphic evidence and the trade record for each explanation, the volume's contributors find none conclusive, since Aksum's fourth-century contacts touched all three at once; the dating of the change is settled, its cause is not. Attributions
Associated SoundHistorically a velar fricative; read as a plain h in the received tradition 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Origins
Origin PeriodDescends from the Ancient South Arabian script; the vocalised seven-order form appears on Aksumite inscriptions of the fourth century CE 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Place of OriginThe kingdom of Aksum, in the northern highlands of what are now Ethiopia and Eritrea 2Tradition: The Ge'ez script Origin of the NameThe Ge'ez letter names are traditional names carried with the script; some are recognisably the inherited Semitic words and others are not, and the relation of the set as a whole to the Northwest Semitic names is only partly recoverable 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural RoleThe script of the Ge'ez liturgy of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches, where the text is chanted rather than read silently 4Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity Open Questions
Sense of the NameNot established for this letter's own name inside the Ge'ez tradition
Harm's own description discusses only its merged pronunciation with hoy and hawt and names no cognate or sense for its name. Identity
Script TypeAn abugida: each base consonant is written in seven vowel orders and is never written without a vowel of its own, which sets the script apart from the consonantal abjads of the rest of the Semitic family 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script PositionEleventh of twenty-six in the halehame order, the traditional order of the fidel, which is not the inherited Semitic order 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script How the Letter JoinsThe letters do not join, and the script runs left to right, unlike every other Semitic script of comparable age 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Use
Ritual UseRead, chanted and copied in the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches, and used for the religious texts of the Ethiopian Jewish tradition 3Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceGe'ez numbers are written with a separate set of twenty numeral characters, so no numeral value attaches to a letter and the script has no counterpart to Hebrew gematria or the Arabic abjad reckoning 5Tradition: The Ge'ez script Meaning in the Attesting SourceWritten in seven orders, ge'ez, ka'eb, salis, rabi', hamis, sadis and sabi', which carry the seven vowels of the classical language; the first order is the citation form and the others modify its shape 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Learn More
Harm, and a Sound the Hebrew Alphabet Never Had a Sign For
Harm wrote a velar fricative in the classical language, the sound at the end of the Scottish pronunciation of loch. Its closest cognate in a living script is the Arabic kha. Hebrew and Syriac have no separate letter for it at all.
That absence is the point. Proto-Semitic is reconstructed with both a pharyngeal and a velar fricative, and in the Canaanite languages the two merged before the twenty-two letter alphabet was fixed. When Hebrew and the other Northwest Semitic scripts inherited that alphabet they inherited a signary that already had one letter where the parent had two, and nothing later in Hebrew can recover the distinction from the script itself. Arabic, whose alphabet was extended with dots to write consonants the borrowed Aramaic signary did not cover, has a separate kha. Ge'ez inherited a larger inventory directly from the South Arabian script, which had not merged them.
So a Ge'ez text and an Arabic text can distinguish two words that a Hebrew text writes identically, and the merger visible in the Northwest Semitic alphabet is datable to before that alphabet was fixed. The atlas relates harm to the Arabic kha as the cognate preserving the phoneme, and to the Hebrew cheth as the letter that absorbed it, with the merger stated on the relation rather than left to be inferred.
Hayl, Power, and Half of an Emperor's Name
Hayl, the Ge'ez word for power or strength, is spelled with this letter in the classical orthography, and it is the first element of the regnal name Haile Selassie, the power of the Trinity. The second element begins with sawt. Two letters of the fidel, both of them letters whose classical sound no modern Amharic reader makes, open the two halves of a name that became one of the most widely recognised in the world.
The name is a compound of the type Ethiopian regnal and baptismal names are commonly built from, a noun in the construct state followed by a divine name or title, giving the power of the Trinity, the gift of Mary, the servant of the Cross. The pattern is productive and it is old, and comparable patterns run through the Hebrew and Arabic naming traditions, which is what one would expect of three branches of one family.
Harm is also one of the letters heading a labiovelar series, a set of signs written with a rounded lip quality, which the character standard treats as rows of their own. The atlas counts the twenty-six plain letters and treats the labiovelars as an extension of the grid, which is how the fidel is taught. A reader working with Ethiopian manuscripts or with Unicode will meet them, and their absence from the count here is not a claim that they do not exist.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Harm wrote a velar fricative that Hebrew had already merged into cheth before the twenty-two letter alphabet was fixed, so Hebrew has no separate sign for it. The relation is to the letter that absorbed the sound rather than to an equivalent of it.
Harm wrote a velar fricative that Syriac had already merged into heth before its alphabet was fixed. The relation is to the letter that absorbed the sound, not to an equivalent of it.
Arabic kha and Ge'ez harm both keep the velar fricative that the Northwest Semitic alphabets had already merged away, so this is the cognate that preserves the sound rather than the one that absorbed it.
Sources
1. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996View the Source 2. Ancient Churches of Ethiopia: Fourth-Fourteenth Centuries
David W. Phillipson, Yale University Press, 2009
3. Ethiopia and the Bible (The Schweich Lectures 1967)
Edward Ullendorff, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1968View the Source 4. Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant: An Anthology
Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Peter Jeffery, A-R Editions, 1993
5. The Unicode Standard
Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)
Wolf Leslau, Otto Harrassowitz, 1987
The Semitic Languages of Ethiopia: A Comparative Phonology
Edward Ullendorff, Taylor's (Foreign) Press, 1955
Open Questions (1 open question)
Do the Ge'ez letter names carry a sense inside Ge'ez, or are they inherited forms only?
A few Ge'ez letter names are transparently words in the language: bet is a house, gaml is a camel, and the word behind res is the word for a head. Most are not, and several, nahas among them, resemble Ge'ez words closely enough to invite a gloss that nothing supports. The atlas records no meaning for those letters, which is a statement about the evidence and leaves open whether the Ethiopian tradition itself ever attached senses to them.
What would resolve this A survey of the Ge'ez grammatical and church-school literature for any indigenous account of the letter names, set against the comparative reconstruction of the Northwest Semitic names, would show whether an Ethiopian gloss tradition exists and what it says.
Ethiopian philology and the history of the traditional church schoolsDivinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition
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