Getatchew Haile


Getatchew Haile is an Ethiopian-American philologist widely considered the foremost scholar of the Ge'ez language alive today. He was acknowledged for his contributions to the field with a MacArthur Fellows Program "genius" award and the Edward Ullendorff Medal from the Council of the British Academy. He was the first Ethiopian and the first African to win the MacArthur.

Career

He is Regents Professor Emeritus of Medieval Studies at Saint John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota, and Curator Emeritus of the Ethiopian Study Center at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, where he began work in 1976. At HMML, he prepared catalogues of more than five thousand Ethiopian manuscripts and trained Ethiopic manuscript cataloguers in paleography, dating, and other skills.
Previously he was associate professor in the Department of Ethiopian Languages and Literature, Haile Sellasie I University, from 1962 to 1969, and 1971 to 1974, where he taught Amharic Grammar, Amharic Literature, Ge’ez Grammar, Ge’ez Literature, Arabic Grammar, and Semitic Linguistics.
He is on the advisory board of a number of journals, including Comité de lecture of Analecta Bollandiana, Ethiopian Journal of Education, Journal of Ethiopian Studies, Northeast African Studies, Ethiopian Register, and Acta Aethiopica.
From 1945 to 1951 he attended Trinity School in Addis Ababa. He moved to Cairo tin 1952, and lived there through most of the 1950s, graduating from the Coptic Theological College, Cairo, Egypt with a B.D. in 1957, and from the American University in Cairo, with a B.A. in 1957. He then moved to Germany in 1957, where he received from the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen a Ph.D. in Semitic Philology in 1962. the title of his dissertation was Das Verbalsystem im Äthiopischen: Ein orphologischer Vergleich mit den orientalischen semitischen Sprachen.
In addition to his writings and translations of a variety of works on Ethiopia and the Orthodox church, he has produced two 2-volume books on the history and beliefs of Abba Estifanos of Gwendagwende, one in 2006 the other in 2011. His first translation, into Amharic, was of Mark Twain’s short story Extracts from Adam’s Diary, in 1965.
The languages in which he works are Amharic, Ge'ez, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, German, and Coptic.

Reputation

Getatchew Haile's work has frequently been described as foundational to the field of Ethiopian studies and he was won many awards.
Edward Ullendorff, professor of Semitic studies at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, described Getatchew Haile's work as "highly significant" due to his "profoundly erudite" knowledge of Ethiopic language and literature. On another occasion, Ullendorff wrote that Getatchew Haile's work represented the "most meticulous and original study of Ethiopic literature" ever done, and "on a scale and depth never before attempted." He added, "no other person before Getatchew Haile has ever been able to survey so much of Ethiopic literary creation and thus to gain so sovereign a command of this genre," which made a contribution not only to Ethiopian studies but also the study of Christian oriental writing more generally.
The Ethiopian poet Amha Asfaw wrote a poem in Amharic for him in 1999.

Personal Life

He was born in Shenkora. As a boy, he attended Ethiopian Orthodox church school, where he learned Ge'ez and "devoted his energies to reading and understanding the texts." Getatchew Haile married Misrak Amare only July 12, 1964, in Sidamo, and they collaborated on books together. They have four children, adopted two more, and have many grandchildren. Among his children is the material science professor Sossina M. Haile and the author Rebecca G. Haile.
In 1974, while a member of the Ethiopian Parliament, Getatchew Haile opposed the Derg government. When government soldiers came to his home to arrest him, he was involved in a several day shootout and eventually shot and captured. However, because of severe damage to his spinal cord, he was allowed to go to London for medical treatment. Since then, he has had paraplegia and uses a wheelchair.

Honors and distinctions