ABSTRACT
Amharic is the main modern exponent of the Southern Ethio-Semitic branch and is to be associated with Argobba, Eastern Gurage and Harari. The term most probably derives from the region Amhara in the northern and central highlands of Ethiopia. According to the census from 2007, Amharic is spoken by approximately 20 million native speakers and additionally by a few million speakers as a second language. Among the first written documents in Amharic are the “royal songs”. Amharic is written in a syllabary, based on the writing system of Classical Ethiopic, which in turn may have been influenced by the equally syllable-based Indian Devanagari system. In Amharic terminology, the syllable signs are referred to as fidal. On both the syntactic and the lexical level, Amharic is subject to a strong Cushitic substratum. The Amharic script does not mark gemination of consonants, thus allowing for a certain number of written doublets.
