Aramaic Loanwords in Ethiopic

More than a century ago, Nöldeke identified and analyzed more than eighty Aramaic loanwords in Ethiopic. Both Guidi and Conti Rossini, in turn, argued that these Aramaic loanwords derived more specifically from Syriac – a Christian dialect of Aramaic – and were thus evidence that the purported “second christianisation” of Ethiopia was the work of foreign missionaries associated with Syriac Christianity. In an influential article, Polotsky showed not only that the Aramaic loanwords in Ethiopic were not necessarily from Syriac but also that some of them were in fact from Jewish dialects of Aramaic. Polotsky’s study was, however, of limited scope, treating only four words. Further research by Ullendorff, Witakowski, Marrassini, Heide, and Tubach, among others, has raised additional questions about some of the purported Syriac loanwords in Ethiopic while at the same time suggested several new possible examples. The number of words re-analyzed to date, however, is only a small fraction of the total number of Aramaic loanwords in Ethiopic. BeInf will provide an updated analysis of all possible Aramaic loanwords in Ethiopic. This analysis will take advantage of recent developments in Aramaic dialectology as well as of the increasingly-robust methodology of contact linguistic. Aramaic loanwords in Ethiopic that are shown to be Syriac will serve as evidence that Ethiopians – or some group of people in contact with Ethiopians – were at some point(s) in time in contact with speakers of Syriac. Similarly, Aramaic loanwords in Ethiopic that are shown to derive from Jewish dialects of Aramaic will be located within the scholarly discourse on (alleged) Jewish intersections with Ethiopic Christianity.