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An Ethiopian Merchants' Argot

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Wolf Leslau
Wolf Leslau*
Affiliation:
Asia Institute, New York
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Extract

During my stay in Ethiopia in 1946–47 I had occasion to investigate various argots, including those of merchants, of minstrels, and of the people possessed by the spirit called zar. The present article will deal with the merchants' argot. There is no unified merchant argot all over Ethiopia, not even among speakers of the same language. The argot under consideration is spoken by the merchants of Moţa, to the north of Debre Markos, the capital of Godjam; it is called kəlaməñña (see §3). A superficial investigation of the argot of the merchants of Gondar, the capital of Begemder, north of Godjam, convinced me that the two argots are quite different. It would be of particular importance to investigate the argot of the merchants of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, which is the meeting-point for merchants of the various populations of the country.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 25 , Issue 1: January-March , March 1949 , pp. 22 - 28
Copyright
© 1949 Linguistic Society of America

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References

* This article is part of a paper read in December 1947 at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in New Haven.

1 A special vocabulary of the Woyto, the hippopotamus-hunters on the shores of Lake Tana, was described by Marcel Cohen, Nouvelles études d'éthiopien méridional 357–71 (1939).

2 I collected the vocabulary of kəlaməñña in Debre Markos.

3 Dauzat, Les argots 53 (Paris, 1929).

4 Perhaps rather akkallämä, judging by the noun of instrument makkalämya.

5 Also used in the argot of minstrels.

6 For the use of ‘father’ and ‘mother’ with the suffixed pronouns, cp. the observations of W. Marçais, Textes arabes de Tanger 503 (Paris, 1911), s.v. yimma: ‘La conscience populaire ne conçoit que difficilement la notion générale de parenté sans acception particulière des individus entre lequels elle existe.‘

7 The substitution of t for h is also encountered in the argot of minstrels; e.g. tonä ‘he is’ for honä.

8 In the other Ethiopic languages also, the Arabic velar ḫ is replaced by k; cp. for instance Tigre käsra ‘lose in business’, from Arabic ḫasara.

9 That is, type C of Amharic.

10 Dauzat, Les argots 127 ff.

11 I. Guidi, Supplemento al vocabolario amarico-italiano 3 (Roma, 1940).

11a A compound descriptive verb.

12 W. Leslau, Documents Tigrigna 127 (Paris, 1941).