Geʽez
Geez (ˈɡiːɛz; ግዕዝ ˈɡɨʕ(ɨ)z, and sometimes referred to in scholarly literature as Classical Ethiopic) is an ancient Ethiopian Semitic language. The language originates from what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. Today, Geez is used as the main liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Ethiopian Catholic Church and Eritrean Catholic Church, and the Beta Israel Jewish community. Tigre and Tigrinya both have a lexical similarity of roughly 70% to Geez. Most linguists believe that Geez does not constitute a common ancestor of modern Ethio-Semitic languages but became a separate language early on from another hypothetical unattested common language. Historically, /ɨ/ has a basic correspondence with Proto-Semitic short and , /æ ~ ɐ/ with short , the vowels /i, u, a/ with Proto-Semitic long respectively, and /e, o/ with the Proto-Semitic diphthongs and . In Geʽez there still exist many alternations between /o/ and /aw/, less so between /e/ and /aj/, e.g. ተሎኩ taloku ~ ተለውኩ talawku ("I followed"). In the transcription employed by the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, which is widely employed in academia, the contrast here represented as a/ā is represented as ä/a. Geez is transliterated according to the following system (see the phoneme table below for IPA values): Because Geez is no longer spoken in daily life by large communities, the early pronunciation of some consonants is not completely certain. Gragg writes that "[t]he consonants corresponding to the graphemes (Geez ሠ) and (Geez ፀ) have merged with ሰ and ጸ respectively in the phonological system represented by the traditional pronunciation—and indeed in all modern Ethiopian Semitic. ... There is, however, no evidence either in the tradition or in Ethiopian Semitic [for] what value these consonants may have had in Geez." A similar problem is found for the consonant transliterated . Gragg notes that it corresponds in etymology to velar or uvular fricatives in other Semitic languages, but it is pronounced exactly the same as in the traditional pronunciation.