| Also Known As: Silti,Selti,East Gurage
Description:
Silt'e (ስልጥኘ [siltʼiɲɲǝ] or የስልጤ አፍ [jǝsiltʼe af]) is a Semitic language spoken in central Ethiopia, mainly within the Silte Zone, in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region and by speakers of the language (today called Silt'e), who have settled in Ethiopian cities, especially Addis Ababa.
Dialects of the language include: Azernet-Berbere, Silti, Wuriro, Ulbareg and Wolane.
Silt'e has a fairly typical set of consonants for an Ethiopian Semitic language. There are the usual ejective consonants, alongside plain voiceless and voiced consonants and all of the consonants, except /h/ and /ʔ/, can be geminated, that is, lengthened. However, Silt'e vowels differ considerably from the typical set of seven vowels in languages such as Amharic, Tigrinya and Ge'ez. Silt'e has the set of five short and five long vowels, that is typical of the nearby Eastern Cushitic languages, which may be the origin of the Silt'e system. There is considerable allophonic variation within the short vowels, especially for a; the most frequent allophone of /a/, [ǝ], is shown in the chart. All of the short vowels may be devoiced preceding a pause.
The charts below show the phonemes of Silt'e. For..... full article at Wikipedia |
