Database of Arabic Words of Amharic Origin

Synopsis

Amharic is one of the Cushitic languages and is characterized by a very rich vocabulary in addition to a unique syntax with versatile grammatical rules and semantic classifications that are well recognized to have great historical and cultural value; the relationship between Amharic and other languages in the region is formulated by linguists as belonging to the so called "Semitic" family of languages that theoritically includes according to the classification Hebrew, Tigrinya, Aramaic, and Arabic.

Although Tigrinya is the closest in terms of phonological aspects and semantics but Amharic also has a clear and evident contribution to the classic and current day Arabic not only in the vocabulary but even in the grammar and syntax including different grammatical tools and classes largely attributed to Arabic.

The most evident of those are the religious terms related to Islamic nomenclature where most if not all are missing or have insufficient explanations in classic and modern Arabic dictionaries while seem to be well defined in Ethiopic literature and language lexicons.

This database is compiled for the purposes of CLIR and other IR disciplines.

Resources

• Databases
• Software

Information

Please download the full database file for free from Database of Arabic Words of Amharic Origin, or get other related samples from dbsamples.htm.
Also available as a github repository.

An easy to view XML version is available here Database of Arabic Words of Amharic Origin XML version.

A fully free Amharic-Arabic word dictionary can also be downloaded from here Amharic-Arabic Word Dictionary.

Reference: DBAMHARA

Entries: 4,000+

Last updated: 2/2/2023

Fields key

Entry: Amharic entry
IPA: Amharic entry phonetic transcription
Roman: Amharic phonemic transcription (custom)
KATS: KATS version of the Arabic parallel entry, please refer to KATS here
Arabic: Arabic parallel
Meaning: simple meaning of the entry
Class: Grammatical class Class
Domain: Semantic domain

Sample