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The Study Of The Tigre Language
By E.D. Thompson
The Tigre-speaking people live in
the northern corner of Eritrea, in a triangle with the Red Sea
coast on one side, the Barka River on another, and the southern
side being more or less a line between Massawa and Agordat. This
triangle extends into the Sudan towards Suakin. The language has
also spread amongst the Bani Amir, a nomadic Beja tribe living
in the same area between the Barka River and the Gash River and
over the border into Sudan. It is also the chief second language
of Nara tribe, who live north and east of Barentu. Tigre is also
spoken around Tessenei and Kesela and will doubtless have been
carried into other nearby areas by the Eritrean refugees. All
Bilen also speak Tigre as well as their own Agau language. In
the sixties there may be at least 200,000 people that speak
Tigre.
It is not clear when anybody came
to realize that the Tigre language had come to differ from its
parent language of Geez, or from its sister language Tigrinya.
Language changes take place more rapidly under conditions of
social change, such as conquest, slavery, migration, trade
cultural penetration. Anything that mixes people mixes language
also.
Judged by these standards it would
seem that the Tigre-speaking tribes of northern Eritrea must
have had a rather stable existence for some 2,000 years or more.
The language seems to be more Semitic, with interesting
developments of structure that have not been so fully worked out
even in Arabic, for instance. Having learned to read Tigre in
the Geez script, it is not big effort to read Geez with
understanding. Tigre speakers told me that on occasions they,
even though Muslims, have attended Orthodox Christian
ceremonies, such as funerals, when the Geez Scriptures or
prayers have been read they have been able to understand quite a
lot of it.
However Tigre was never a written
language, neither was Tigrinya. The first studies of these
languages concentrated on Geez. About the first European in this
field  was Ludolf, in the 17 century. The 19th century
investigators moved on to include Tigrinya and Tigre were
followed in the last century by Guidi, Cerulli, Littmann, Leslau
and Ullendorf. The last three gave rather more attention to
Tigre than the previous scholars. In particular Leslau produced
a dictionary of Tigre. I have not seen it but it has been
reported to me variously as Tigre-French and Tigre-German. There
were others in this field also, and Leslau seems to sum up the
grammatical results of these studies in “Characteristics of
the Abyssinian language group of Semitic languages†He
includes several of the minor Semitic languages in his
comparison. Another comparatively study on Tigre is “ The
Morphology of the Tigre Noun†by F.R. Palmer (1962).
The Bible was translated into Geez
about the 3rd or 4th century A.D., and there are many
inscriptions on stone monuments pre-dating that. The style of
writing merges with that of ancient South Arabia, so the trail
goes right back to the ancient Semitic languages, especially
Hebrew and Arabic.
The investigators of Tigre soon
realized that the language fitted right into the pattern
alongside of Geez. The latest studies confirm the earlier
impression that Tigre seems to be nearest to Geez of modern
languages. According to Bender Tigre is closest to Geez of all
the languages 71%, Tigrinya close behind 68% . Tigre and
Tigrinya seem to be significantly less related to one another
than they both are to Geez. My impression is that this includes
grammatical structure as well as vocabulary. Consequently the
scholars who investigated Tigre assumed that the spelling Tigre
would be the same as that of Geez. Unfortunately their
interpretations of this were influenced by the correlation of
spelling and pronunciation of Amharic and Tigrinya. Thus the
Catholic mission, which did not have as much concern with Tigre
people as the Swedish Evangelical Mission, followed what seemed
to the classical and scholarly methods of spelling Tigre and
analysis its grammar, producing a combined grammar and
dictionary, “Grammatrica della Lingua Tigre.â€
On the other hand, the Swedish Evangelical Mission, based on
the Geleb, went into Tigre language much more deeply. They
discovered that the Tigre tribes had a notable store of poems
and songs and traditions that had been verbally passed on and
memorized. Karl Gustav Roden was the missionary most involved
language-wise. He helped local men translate the New Testament.
They also collected the genealogies, stories, poems, and
customary law of the Mensa tribe, and he had them published
under the title kl’e mensaE (the two mensaE). Richard
Sundstrom also made an important contribution with the
translation of Psalms and Isaiah, and an unpublished Grammar of
Tigre. Musa Aron and Axel Berglund are following in this
tradition, working at the present time on completing the whole
Bible in Tigre. The Swedish Publications in Tigre use a slightly
different spelling system from the Catholic Mission. .
The scholar who seemed to have made
the greatest contribution to Tigre studies, other that the
missionaries, was Enno Littmann. He and Sundstrom made a large
collection of poems, songs and stories also.
Later Development:-
In the late sixties, some Israeli
and Japanese scholars also prepared a sizeable Tigre grammar and
vocabulary dictionary that focused on active verbs. Also, during
the struggle years, several Tigre text books were published by
EPLF’s Department of Education. After liberation, the first
Tigre news paper issued for all to read. Also, some Tigrina
books have been translated into Tigre, but at this point, such
effort is more highlighted upon the publication of monumental
Tigre dictionary, by memhr Musa Aron. It is to be recalled the
bilingual Tigre-Tigrina proverbs and riddles that he generously
translated was published by Yohanna Mahtem.
This paper has been submitted in
response to recent symposium on Tigre langage in Eritrea.
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