| Also Known As: North Gurage,Soddo,Kistane,Soddo Gurage
Description:
Soddo (autonym kəstane "Christian"; formerly called Aymälläl in Western sources, after a particular dialect of it) is a Gurage language spoken by about 300,000 people in southeastern Ethiopia. It is a South Ethiopian Semitic language of the Northern Gurage subfamily.
As in most Ethiopian languages, noun qualifiers generally precede the noun.
The definite article is expressed by the suffix -i, e.g.: goš "boy" > goš-i "the boy"; ätit "sister" > ätiti "the sister"; bayyočč "children" > bayyočč-i. If the noun ends in -a or -ä, it normally loses this vowel when -i is suffixed: angačča "cat" > angačč-i "the cat". A noun ending in -i usually stays the same: abi "(the) father, proprietor". A noun ending in -e, -o, -u adds a y before the suffix: ge "house" > geʸi "the house"; wälläho "neighbor" > wällähoʸi "the neighbor". If the noun has a qualifier, the article is used with the first element: maläk' ge "big house" > maläk'-i ge "the big house"; yä-šum-i ge "the house of the official" (lit. "of-official-the house"); yä-mät't'-i məss "the man who came" (lit. "who-came-the man".)
There is no real indefinite article, though indefiniteness can be expressed by preposing the word attə or k'una,..... full article at Wikipedia |
