ABSTRACT
Tigrinya dialectology is in a rudimentary state. Northern and southern dialects are distinguished. The latter are marked by a considerable number of innovative features likely developed under the influence of Amharic and/or neighboring Oromo. Modern written Tigrinya has developed rigid orthographic rules which strive for one-to-one correspondence between the sounds and their graphic representations. Unlike in Amharic and medieval Geez, the first order graphemes are consistently used to denote Ce sequence, even with guttural consonants. Tigrinya is one of the few modern Ethio-Semitic languages which have preserved most of the proto-Ethio-Semitic guttural consonants. As elsewhere in Ethio-Semitic, the triad “voiced-voiceless-glottalized” is prominent in Tigrinya. The proto-Ethio-Semitic seven-vowel system is well preserved in Tigrinya. Tigrinya has two sets of demonstratives: proximal and distant. For each set, the basic form can be expanded into “long” form by means of the corresponding 3rd person argument indexes.
