ABSTRACT
Tigre is spoken in Eritrea and Eastern Sudan and is the fifth largest Semitic language by number of speakers after Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya and Hebrew. Grammatical differences among the Ethiopian Semitic languages are most clearly demonstrated along geographic lines, namely southern languages vs. northern languages. Late 20th century literary productivity was reignited when the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front gained control of Tigre-speaking regions, leading up to Eritrea’s independence in 1991. Tigre became the language of instruction in geographic areas, and schoolbooks and pamphlets were published in Tigre. Tigre words are in general comprised of a sequence of consonants, sometimes called “root consonants,” attested with vocalic patterns and affixes in a finite number of combinations. Tigre is both synthetic and analytic in nature. Analytic characteristics are found in a number of features. The more common type is a substantive, a relative clause without an antecedent.
