Saday (Tsa) ጸ

Saday writes an ejective s and continues the Semitic consonant behind the Hebrew tzaddi, the Syriac sadhe and the Arabic sad. The correspondence is direct and uncontested.

What is unusual is that Ge'ez has a second letter of the same class. Sappa, the letter that follows this one in the order, wrote another emphatic sibilant, and Hebrew and Syriac have no counterpart to it because their branch merged the two before their alphabets were fixed. Arabic keeps both, writing the second one with dad. So on this pair Ge'ez agrees with Arabic against the Northwest Semitic scripts, which is a recurring result across the fidel and a reason the atlas records Arabic cognates on several of these letters rather than only Hebrew ones.

In the received Ethiopian reading tradition the two have fallen together and are sounded alike, so the distinction survives only in spelling. A scribe cannot hear which letter a word takes and has to know it, which is the same situation as the two h letters and the two plain s letters. Four separate mergers give the fidel more signs than a modern reader has sounds, and every one of them is preserved because the classical text is fixed.

The four mergers are worth counting, because between them they are the reason a beginner finds the fidel harder than its size suggests. Twenty-six letters is a small alphabet. Twenty-six letters of which eight fall into four pairs that sound alike is a spelling system, and a spelling system has to be learned word by word in the way English spelling does.

Tselot, the Ge'ez word for prayer, begins with this letter. The Ethiopian and Eritrean churches keep an office through the day, and the books that carry it are among the most copied in the tradition.

The most widely used of them is the Weddase Maryam, the Praise of Mary, a cycle with a portion for each day of the week which is recited daily in monasteries and by many of the laity. Ethiopian tradition attributes it to Ephrem the Syrian. The attribution is traditional, and the atlas records it as an attribution rather than as an authorship, because the text as it stands in Ge'ez is a translation with an Ethiopian history of its own and the question of what stands behind it is not one a content record should settle by repeating the tradition.

Beside the office there is the Psalter, which in Ethiopian use is not only read but memorised, and a student in the church schools is expected to know it. The Ge'ez Psalter includes a fifteen-part canticle section drawn from elsewhere in scripture, so the book a student learns is longer than the hundred and fifty psalms. That is one more instance of the general shape of this tradition, where the received text is wider than the one a reader elsewhere would expect.