Our girls will be getting the first letter from us on Tuesday when they get their Welcome Bag. I'm really eager to hear aboout their reaction. Hopefully they will be excited about us, and enjoy the little things we sent them. I'm already working on writing more letters for them, to be delivered by traveling families during the next couple months.

One of the things that I wanted to include in the next letter is a Bible verse. I found this cool online Bible that has PDF files of the various books of the Bible written in the actual Amharic script. Since I don't know if our girls read much English yet at this point, I'm excited to be able to include a verse in both Amharic and English.

This week an online friend asked me about Amharic. Specifically she wanted to know if it uses an Arabic script. (She knows Arabic.) I sent her the link to the Amharic Bible site so she could compare. She told me that it is not like Arabic script. It is like much older precursors to Arabic. It has some similiarities to Aramaic, a language still used as a liturgical text by Syriac Christians, and the language that Jesus spoke.

She said that according to this link it is possibly related to Saaban, an extinct South Arabian language and script. Apparently Arabic evolved in part from such languages and scripts as did modern
Hebrew.

My friend was impressed by her bit of research of the language, and saw it as further evidence of the absolutely ancient nature of civilization in Ethiopia and its connection to the early world of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. She's guessing that the Amharic language is three to four thousand years old.

I was really interested to know a bit more about the Amharic language and thought some of my readers might be interested as well. If you would like to label some things in Amharic for your child's photo album, be sure to check out this link from the Ethiopia Adoption Travelogue. There's an awesome file you can open and then use to paste Amharic script on the items and people in your albums.

Related Posts:

Common Amharic Words
Talk Now Amharic
Bilingual Books for New Arrivals