EritreaEritrea (ˌɛrᵻˈtriːə or -ˈtreɪ- ; Ertra, ʔer(ɨ)trä), officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa region of Eastern Africa, with its capital and largest city at Asmara. It is bordered by Ethiopia in the south, Sudan in the west, and Djibouti in the southeast. The northeastern and eastern parts of Eritrea have an extensive coastline along the Red Sea. The nation has a total area of approximately , and includes the Dahlak Archipelago and several of the Hanish Islands.
EthiopiaEthiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east and southeast, Kenya to the south, South Sudan to the west, and Sudan to the northwest. Ethiopia covers land area of 1,112,000 square kilometres (472,000 sq. miles). , it is home to around 116.5 million inhabitants, making it the 13th-most populous country in the world, the 2nd-most populous in Africa after Nigeria, and the most populated landlocked country on Earth.
Geʽez scriptGeʽez (Gəʽəz, ˈɡɨʕɨz) is a script used as an abugida (alphasyllabary) for several Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea. It originated as an abjad (consonant-only alphabet) and was first used to write the Geʽez language, now the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Catholic Church, the Ethiopian Catholic Church, and Haymanot Judaism of the Beta Israel Jewish community in Ethiopia.
Solomonic dynastyThe Solomonic dynasty, also known as the House of Solomon, was the ruling dynasty of the Ethiopian Empire from the thirteenth to twentieth centuries. The dynasty was founded by Yekuno Amlak, who overthrew the Zagwe dynasty in 1270. His successors claimed he was descended from the legendary king Menelik I, the supposed son of the biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, in order to legitimize the dynasty's assumption of power. Although this claimed ancestry gave the dynasty its name, there is no credible evidence that the dynasty was descended from Solomon or the Davidic line.
Phoenician alphabetThe Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet (more specifically, an abjad) known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization. The Phoenician alphabet is also called the Early Linear script (in a Semitic context, not connected to Minoan writing systems), because it is an early development of the Proto- or Old Canaanite or Proto-Sinaitic script, into a linear, purely alphabetic script, also marking the transfer from a multi-directional writing system, where a variety of writing directions occurred, to a regulated horizontal, right-to-left script.
Tigre languageTigre (ትግረ tigre or ትግሬ tigrē), better known in Eritrea by its autonym Tigrayit (ትግራይት), is a language spoken in the Horn of Africa. A Semitic language, it 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 Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Tigre has a lexical similarity of 71% with Ge’ez and of 64% with Tigrinya.
Shin (letter)Shin (also spelled Šin (DIN) or Sheen) is the twenty-first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician šīn , Hebrew šīn ש, Aramaic šīn , Syriac šīn ܫ, and Arabic sin س. Its sound value is a voiceless sibilant, ʃ or s. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Sigma () (which in turn gave Latin S and Cyrillic С), and the letter Sha in the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts (, ). The South Arabian and Ethiopian letter Śawt is also cognate.
Proto-Semitic languageProto-Semitic is the hypothetical reconstructed proto-language ancestral to the Semitic languages. There is no consensus regarding the location of the Proto-Semitic Urheimat: scholars hypothesize that it may have originated in the Levant, the Sahara, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, or northern Africa. Nowadays the likeliest place of origin is North Africa. The Semitic language family is considered part of the broader macro-family of Afroasiatic languages.
Sacred languageA sacred language, holy language or liturgical language is any language that is cultivated and used primarily for religious reasons (like church service) by people who speak another, primary language in their daily lives. A sacred language is often the language which was spoken and written in the society in which a religion's sacred texts were first set down; these texts thereafter become fixed and holy, remaining frozen and immune to later linguistic developments.
Latin scriptThe Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy (Magna Graecia). The Greek alphabet was adopted by the Etruscans, and subsequently their alphabet was adopted by the Romans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.
