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Weyto |
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The Weyto language is believed to be an extinct language formerly spoken in the Lake Tana region of Ethiopia by the Weyto,
a small group of hippopotamus hunters who now speak Amharic. The Weyto language was first mentioned by the Scottish traveler
James Bruce, who spoke Amharic, passed through the area about 1770 and reported that the Wayto speak a language radically
different from any of those in Abyssinia, but was unable to obtain any certain information on it, despite prevailing upon
the king to send for two Weyto men for him to ask questions, which they would neither answer nor understand even when threatened
with hanging. The next European to report on them, Eugen Mittwoch, described them as uniformly speaking a dialect of Amharic
(Mittwoch 1907). This report was confirmed by Marcel Griaule when he passed through in 1928, although he added that at one
point a Weyto sang an unrecorded song in the dead language of the Wohitos whose meaning the singer himself did not understand,
except for a handful of words for hippopotamus body parts which, he says, had remained in use. This Amharic dialect is described
by Marcel Cohen (1939) as featuring a fair number of words derived from Amharic roots but twisted in sound or meaning in order
to confuse outsiders, making it a sort of argot; in addition to these, it had a small number of Cushitic loanwords not found
in standard Amharic, and a large number of Arabic loanwords mainly related to Islam. Of the substantial wordlist collected
by Griaule, Cohen only considered six terms to be etymologically obscure: šəlkərít fish-scale, qəntat wing, čəgəmbit mosquito,
annessa shoulder, nkes hippopotamus thigh, wazəməs hippopotamus spine. By 1965, the visiting anthropologist Frederick Gamst
found no surviving native words, not even relating to their hunting and fishing work tasks. (Gamst 1965. ) The paucity of
the data available has not prevented speculation on the classification of their original language; Cohen suggested that it
might have been either an Agaw language or a non-Amharic Semitic language, while Dimmendaal (1989) says it probably belonged
to Cushitic (as does Agaw), and Gamst (1965) says ... it can be assumed that if the Wäyto did not speak Amharic 200 years
ago, their language must have been Agäw... According to the Ethnologue, Bender et al. (1976) saw it as Cushitic, while Bender
1983 saw it as either Eastern Sudanic or Awngi. It thus effectively remains unclassified, largely for lack of data, but possibly
related to Agaw. |
Names (more)[br] Weytoeg[en] Weyto language |
Language type : Extinct
Technical notes
This page is providing structured data for the language Weyto. |
ISO 639 CodesISO 639-3 : woyLinked Data URIshttp://lexvo.org/id/iso639-3/woyhttp://dbpedia.org/resource/ISO_639:woy More URIs at sameas.org SourcesAuthority documentation for ISO 639 identifier: woyFreebase ISO 639-3 : woy GeoNames.org Country Information Publications Office of the European Union Metadata Registry : Countries and Languages |