Tigre language


Tigre, better known in Eritrea by its autonym Tigrayit, and also known by speakers in Sudan as al-Bani amir, is an Afroasiatic language spoken in the Horn of Africa. It belongs to the North Ethiopic subdivision of the South Semitic languages and is primarily spoken by the Tigre people in Eritrea. Along with Tigrinya, it is believed to be the most closely related living language to Ge'ez, which is still in use as the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Tigre has lexical similarity, 71% with Ge’ez and 64% with Tigrinya. As of 1997, Tigre was spoken by approximately 800,000 Tigre people in Eritrea. The Tigre mainly inhabit western Eritrea, though they also reside in the northern highlands of Eritrea and its extension into the adjacent part of Sudan, as well as Eritrea's Red Sea coast north of Zula.
The Tigre people are not to be confused with their neighbors to the south, the Tigrayans of Eritrea and Ethiopia, who speak Tigrinya. Tigrinya is also derived from the parent Ge'ez tongue, but is quite distinct from Tigre despite the similarity in name.

Dialects

There are several dialects of Tigre, some of them are; Mansa’, Habab, Barka, Semhar, Algeden, Senhit and Dahalik, which is spoken in Dahlak archipelago. Intelligibility between the dialects is above 91%, where intelligibility between Dahalik and the other dialects is between 24% to 51%.

Numeral

Tigre has preserved the two pharyngeal consonants of Ge'ez. The Ge'ez vowel inventory has almost been preserved except that the two vowels which are phonetically close to and seem to have evolved into a pair of phonemes which have the same quality but differ in length; vs.. The original phonemic distinction according to quality survives in Tigrinya. The vowel, traditionally named "first order vowel", is most commonly transcribed ä in Semitic linguistics.
The phonemes of Tigre are displayed below in both International Phonetic Alphabet symbols and the symbols common among linguists who work on Ethiopian Semitic languages. For the long vowel, the symbol 'ā' is used per Raz. Three consonants, /p, p', x/, occur only in a small number of loanwords, hence they are written in parentheses.
As in other Ethiopian Semitic languages, the phonemic status of is questionable; it may be possible to treat it as an epenthetic vowel that is introduced to break up consonant clusters.

FrontCentralBack
Closeə
Mid
Opena, ā

Consonant length

Consonant length is phonemic in Tigre, although there are few such minimal pairs. Some consonants do not occur long; these include the pharyngeal consonants, the glottal consonants,, and. In this language, long consonants arise almost solely by gemination as a morphological process; there are few, if any, long consonants in word roots. Gemination is especially prominent in verb morphology.

Grammar

These notes use the spelling adopted by Camperio which seems to approximate to Italian rules.
Nouns are of two genders, masculine and feminine.
As we might expect from a Semitic language, specifically feminine forms, where they exist, are often formed of an element with t:
In a similar way, sound-changes can also mark the difference between singular and plural:
Personal pronouns distinguish "you, masculine" and "you, feminine" in both singular and plural:
The possessive pronouns appear suffixed to the noun, as separate words:
The verb "to be":
The verb "to be", past tense:
The verb "to have":
and so on, with the last word in each case:
The verb "to have": past tense, using a feminine noun as an example:
and so on, with the last word in each case:
Other samples
Since around 1889, the Ge'ez script has been used to write the Tigre language. Tigre speakers formerly used Arabic more widely as a lingua franca. The Bible has been translated into the Tigre language.

Ge'ez script

Ge'ez script is an abugida, with each character representing a consonant+vowel combination. Ge'ez and its script are also called Ethiopic. The script has been modified slightly to write Tigre.