Ge’ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model
Authors : †Desta Berihu, ‡Sebsibe Hailemariam, *Zeradawit Adhana
† ‡ *
School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, Department of computer science, Department of Ge’ez Language,
Institute of Technology, College of Natural Science, Holy Trinity Theological College,
Bahir Dar University Addis Ababa University Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church

Outline:
1.Introduction
2.Motivation and Objective
3.Ge’ez Verbs morphology
4.Classification of Ge’ez Verbs
5.Ge’ez Verbs formation
6.Verbal Stems
7. Declaration Model for Ge’ez verbs
8.Assimilation and Phonological changes
9.Conclusion
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 2

1. Introduction
Ethiopia is one of the ancient countries in the world.
It has :
 a well-defined history of more than three thousand years [Lule, 1986];
 an ancient ,well-organized and indigenous educational system;
 its own language (Ge’ez) with its alphabets and number system [Dillmann,
1899];
 ancient manuscripts [historical, ethical, religious… manuscripts and
chronicles];
 arts (q∂ne);
 calendar ;
 hymns;
 and varies heritages, etc.
These all are found being written in Ge’ez language!!

Introduction…
Ge’ez is the classical language of Ethiopia.
It is the language where majority of the Ethiopian literatures and
manuscripts are written in.
For Example:
The Ethiopian collection in the British Library comprises more than 800
manuscripts written in Ge’ez dating from the 15th to the 20th centuries
[see http://en.academic.ru].
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 4

2. Motivation and objective
Motivation:
The potential resources on the subject of the knowledge, philosophy
and culture of Ethiopia are found being written in this ancient language.
Nevertheless, the current generation, except some scholars in the
Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church (EOTC), seems to be ignorant of
these resources because of lack of efforts in making the language
operational and in exploiting its usage with scientific approaches.
Specific bjectives of this paper
 Reporting on the first complete account of Ge’ez verbs morphology by
exploring the verb formation process
 Designing a declaration model which helps to find all possible surface
verbs of a given lexeme in Ge’ez
Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration
03/12/2011 5
Model

3) Ge’ez Verbs morphology
Morphology is the study of the way words are built up from smaller
meaning-bearing units, called morphemes.
Morpheme is the building block from which a word is made up from
[Jurasfsky and Martine, 2006].
Ge’ez verbs exhibit the typical Semitic non-linear word formation with
intercalation (inter-digitation) of roots with vocalic patterns.
Verbs are morphologically the most complex POS in Ge’ez, with more than
1370 inflectional forms.
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 6

4) Classification of Ge’ez verbs
Ethiopian scholars classify verbs on the basis of criteria
typically:
 gemination and non-gemination
 number and position of radicals
 positions of gutturals and semi-vowels
 conjugation patterns
 stems of the verbs
Classification by foreign scholars is based on:
 Stems of the verbs
 Number of radicals of a root
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 7

Classification …
Three criteria are used in this study to cluster Ge’ez verbs:
a) based on object indication:
 transitive, intransitive and copula verbs.
b) based on number of radicals
Tri-radical, quadri-radical, and multi-radical [Dillmann, 1899]
Tri-radical roots are composed of three radicals and are those which
best answer to the Semitic root-forming tendency [Dillmann,
1899:125].
There seems to exist, however, roots possessing only two radicals
like:
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 8

Classification …
 Every original root of Ge’ez comprises of three firm alphabets
[Dillmann, 1899].
 Roots with more than four radicals are not at all common in Ge’ez
[Dillmann, 1899:122-123].
Result of Researcher’s survey on the Ge’ez-Amharic dictionary
by Liqähruyan Bälay Mäkonän [2000]
c) based on ‘heads’ and ‘troops’
 by taking their CV-template as a basic unit .[Kidanä Wäld, 1948:61],
[Zäradawit, 1996:181], [Afäwärq, 1988:159], [Ludolf, 1699], [Lambdine, 1978],
[Dillmann, 1899] and Leslau [1987:VI].
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 9

Classification …
Table 1: below depicts the list of the ‘head’ verbs.
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 10

5) Ge’ez verb formation
Figure-2 verb formation process in Ge’ez.
Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration
03/12/2011 11
Model

6) Verbal Stems
According to the Ethiopian scholars, verbal stems (አዕማድ /a^∂mad/) are the
pillars or bases of verbs that support the conjugation patterns of verbs.
Different scholars say differently regarding to verbal stems.
This study assumes the five stem patterns identified by the Ethiopian
scholars: perfective, causative, causative-reciprocal, reflexive, and
reciprocal stem [Zäradawit, 1996].
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 12

Verbal Stems…
Each of the tense-moods do have five stem types [see Table-3]
Table-3: The five stem types for each of the seven tense-moods conjugation patterns
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 13

7) Declaration Model for Ge’ez verbs
We use the word ‘declaration’ for the process of finding all the
inflected (surface) forms of a lexeme of a given Ge’ez verb .
The declaration process starts from the third person singular
masculine (3psm) form of the verb.
It passes through three independent phases [see Figure-3]:
Figure-3: Declaration model for Ge’ez verbs
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 14

Figure-4: Example of declaration
process for finding all possible surface
verbs of the perfective category stems
15

8) Assimilation and Phonological changes occurred
during the verb formation process
Phonological and assimilation effects are seen at the boundaries of the
morphemes during the concatenation process.
Two possible occurrences of assimilation effects are observed in verbs
which end with either of the glottal alphabets namely ቀ /qä/, ከ /kä/, ገ /gä
and ነ /nä/ (see Table-4) or semivowel alphabets namely ወ /wä/ and የ /yä/
[see Table-5).
Phonological changes, on the other hand, are usually occurred when object
marker suffixes are added after SMSs (see Table-6) or circumfixes.
(see Table-7).
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 16

Assimilation and Phonological changes …
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 17

Assimilation and Phonological changes …
Table-5: Assimilation of a verb ፈተወ /fätäwä/ (he wanted) with ወ /wä/ at its end
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 18

Assimilation and Phonological changes …
Table-6: Vowel changes occurred when OMS are attached right after SMS
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 19

Assimilation and Phonological changes …
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 20

Assimilation and Phonological changes …
Table-7: Vowel changes occurred when OMS are attached after circumfixes
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 21

9) Conclusion
Ge’ez verbs, alike the other Semitic languages, do have prosodic non-
concatenatative morphology.
Its non-concatenative nature is characterized by the internal modification of
a seed of a verb.
The Ge’ez verbs morphology described and the declaration model designed
can be used by both linguistic and computational researchers.
The model can also be consumed by various Natural Language Processing
(NLP) systems such as machine translation, spell-check, speech
recognition, automatic dictionary (lexicon) compilation, POS tagging,
morphological analyzer and synthesizer, automatic sentence construction,
etc.
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 22

ንሴብሐክሙ
ነመስግነኩም
እናመሰግናችኋለን
[=We Thank you]
desta4us@gmail.com
sebsibe2004@yahoo.com
Questions and/or Comments
03/12/2011 Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration Model 23

See Complete Declaration Result
Ge'ez Verbs Morphology and Declaration
03/12/2011 24
Model