Alphabet Letters
Hawt (Hha) ሐ
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
Hawt is the third letter of the Ge'ez fidel. In the classical language it wrote a pharyngeal h, distinct from the plain h of hoy, but in the reading tradition of the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches the two have fallen together and are both sounded h. Ge'ez has three such letters that a modern reader pronounces alike, hoy, hawt and harm, and keeping them apart in writing is a matter of orthography learned word by word, much as English keeps spellings that its pronunciation no longer distinguishes. The letter appears in all seven orders and is written in the same hand in manuscripts and in print.
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 pharyngeal h; 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
Hawt's own description discusses only its merged pronunciation with hoy and harm 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 PositionThird 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
Hawt, and the Pharyngeal That Amharic Lost
Hawt continues the Semitic pharyngeal fricative, the consonant behind the Hebrew cheth, the Syriac heth and the Arabic letter transcribed as h with a dot beneath it. Of the three letters in the fidel that a modern Amharic reader sounds as a plain h, this is the middle one, and its classical value is the best secured of the three, because the sound is still made in Arabic and in Tigrinya.
That second point should be separated from the general statement that Ge'ez has merged its h letters, because the merger is not uniform across the region. Amharic has lost the pharyngeals entirely, so an Amharic speaker reading the liturgy sounds hoy, hawt and harm alike. Tigrinya, spoken in Eritrea and in Tigray, keeps the pharyngeal distinct, so a Tigrinya reader makes a difference at this letter that an Amharic reader does not. The written form is identical in both cases. What differs is the reading tradition brought to it, and a description of the script that reports only the Amharic outcome misses half of its living use.
Comparative work of the kind Edward Ullendorff set out for the Ethiopian Semitic languages reconstructs the classical values from exactly this unevenness. A sound kept in one daughter language and lost in another is stronger evidence than a sound lost in all of them.
Hawarya, and the Books That Only Ge'ez Preserves
Hawarya, the Ge'ez word for an apostle, begins with this letter, and so does Haddis Kidan, the new covenant, the name of the New Testament. Both belong to the vocabulary of a scriptural canon wider than any other Christian one. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church counts eighty-one books, and among them are works that survive complete in no other language.
The two best known are the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. Both were composed in a Semitic language, and fragments of each in Aramaic were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the continuous text of either survived only in Ge'ez, copied and recopied in Ethiopian monasteries for well over a millennium while the rest of the Christian world lost it. When European scholarship recovered Enoch in the eighteenth century it was from Ge'ez manuscripts brought out of Ethiopia.
This is the strongest single argument for treating the fidel as more than a regional curiosity. A script preserved a body of ancient literature that would otherwise be known only in fragments, and it did so not through an archive or an accident of burial but through an unbroken practice of copying by hand inside a working church. The atlas records the letter. The letter is part of the mechanism by which those books are still readable at all.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Hawt and the Hebrew cheth continue the Semitic pharyngeal h. Hebrew merged a second consonant, the velar fricative, into this same letter, where Ge'ez kept that one separate as harm.
Hawt and the Syriac heth continue the Semitic pharyngeal h. Syriac merged the velar fricative into this letter, as Hebrew did, where Ge'ez kept it separate as harm.
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
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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