Weyto language
Weyto | |
---|---|
(of Lake Tana) | |
Region | Lake Tana, Ethiopia |
Ethnicity | Weyto caste |
Extinct | 19th century |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | woy |
woy.html | |
Glottolog | weyt1237 |
Weyto (also Wayto) is a speculative
The Weyto language was first mentioned by the Scottish traveler James Bruce, who spoke Amharic. Bruce passed through the area about 1770 and reported that "the Weyto 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 the Weyto, 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.[citation needed]
This Amharic dialect is described by
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
References
Sources
- Bender, M. L., J. D. Bowen, C. A. Cooper, and C. A. Ferguson, eds. 1976. Language in Ethiopia. Oxford University Press.
- Bender, M. L., ed. 1983. Nilo-Saharan language studies. Summer Institute of Linguistics.
- Bruce, James M. 1790. Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 1768-73 (5 vols.) Edinburgh: G. Robinson & J. Robinson. (vol. iii, p. 403)
- Cohen, Marcel. Nouvelles Etudes d'Ethiopien Méridional. Paris: Champion. pp. 358–371.
- Dimmendaal, Gerrit. 1989. "On Language Death in Eastern Africa", in Dorian, Nancy C. (ed.), Investigating obsolescence: Studies in language contraction and death (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 7.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Gamst, Frederick. 1965. Travel and research in northern Ethiopia. (Notes for Anthropologists and Other Field Workers in Ethiopia 2.) Addis Ababa Institute for Ethiopian Studies, Haile Selassie I University.
- Gamst, Frederick. 1979. "Wayto ways: Change from hunting to peasant life", in Hess (ed.), Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Ethiopian Studies, Session B. Chicago: University of Illinois at Chicago Circle.
- Gamst, Frederick. 1984. "Wayto", in Weeks, R. V. (ed.), Muslim peoples: a world ethnographic survey, 2nd edition, (2 vols.) Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
- Griaule, Marcel. Les flambeurs d'hommes. Paris 1934.
- Mittwoch, Eugen. 1907. "Proben aus dem amharischen Volksmund", Mittheilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen zu Berlin 10(2), pp. 185–241.
- Sommer, Gabriele. "A survey on language death in Africa", in Matthias Brenziger (ed.), Language Death: Factual and Theoretical Explorations with Special Reference to East Africa. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter 1992.