Alphabet Letters
Wawe (Wa) ወ
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
Wawe is the fifteenth letter of the Ge'ez fidel and writes the semivowel w. Its name is the inherited Semitic word behind Hebrew waw and Arabic waw. Because the Ge'ez script marks its vowels on the consonant itself, it has no need of the trick by which the consonant-only Semitic scripts press w and y into service as vowel letters, and wawe is simply a consonant. That is the practical difference the fourth century vocalisation made: a Ge'ez text is fully readable without a reading tradition to supply the vowels, which is not true of an unpointed Hebrew or Arabic one.
Facts
Attributions
Associated Soundw 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 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. 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 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 Open Questions
Sense of the NameNot established for this letter's own name inside the Ge'ez tradition
Wawe's own description names Hebrew waw and Arabic waw as its inherited Semitic cognate but states no sense. The comparative reconstruction credits waw with the sense nail or hook (already live on Hebrew Vav), but whether the Ge'ez tradition itself ever attached that sense to the name, rather than only the form, is untested. 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 PositionFifteenth 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
Wawe, and the Consonants That Make Semitic Grammar Difficult
Wawe writes the semivowel w and continues the Semitic consonant behind the Hebrew vav, the Syriac waw and the Arabic waw. Ge'ez keeps the w. Most Hebrew reading traditions have moved the letter to a v, which is a change in the language rather than in the script.
Semitic words are built on roots of, most often, three consonants, with vowels and affixes fitted around them in patterns. That system works cleanly when all three consonants are ordinary ones. It works badly when one of them is w or y, because those two behave half like consonants and half like vowels and tend to disappear, lengthen a neighbouring vowel, or change quality depending on where in the pattern they fall. Grammars of Ge'ez, Hebrew and Arabic alike therefore spend a large part of their length on the verbs whose roots contain one, and call them weak.
So a letter that looks unremarkable on a chart marks the point where the grammar becomes irregular. That is a good argument against reading an alphabet as a straightforward inventory of sounds. The signs are of equal weight on the page and are not of equal weight in the language, and it takes a grammar rather than a chart to show which is which.
It is also part of why an Ethiopian church school teaches grammar as a stage of its own rather than treating reading as the whole of literacy. A student who can pronounce every sign in the fidel still cannot parse a verb whose root contains a w, and the traditional curriculum separates the two skills and takes them in order.
Wengel, and a Bible Translated From Greek
Wengel, the Ge'ez word for a gospel, begins with this letter, and it is a borrowing: it comes from the Greek euangelion, and it arrived with the text it names. The Ge'ez Bible was translated from Greek, not from Hebrew or Syriac, and the translation belongs to the Aksumite period, beginning in the fourth or fifth century, in the generations after the kingdom adopted Christianity.
Ethiopian tradition credits a large part of that work to the Nine Saints, a group of monks who arrived from the Roman east in the late fifth century and who are also credited with the founding of monasteries that still exist. Scholarship treats the tradition with care: the translation was plainly the work of more than one hand and more than one generation, and the evidence for who did what is thin. The atlas records the tradition as tradition and the Greek source of the text as the better established fact.
A stratum of Greek Christian vocabulary entered Ge'ez at the same time and stayed. Wengel is one item of it, and the names of the church's offices and books carry more. That layer sits on top of an inherited Semitic vocabulary, so a Ge'ez sentence about the liturgy can draw on two quite different histories in the same clause.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Wawe and the Hebrew vav continue the Semitic w. Ge'ez keeps the w. Most Hebrew reading traditions have moved the letter to a v, which is a change in the language rather than in the script.
Wawe and the Syriac waw continue the Semitic w, and both keep it as a consonant rather than shifting it to a v as most Hebrew reading traditions have.
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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