Lexical Semantics Over the History of Amharic

How did Amharic words pass through time? Amharic, an Ethio-Semitic language, has undergone phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic changes through time. This book examines the nature of semantic change (or diachronic semantics) in the history of Amharic. It is, of course, based on the assumption that everything in the universe is in a perpetual state of change. The book displays the process of meaning change by providing linguistic evidences from Amharic. More specifically, it demonstrates how a multiplicity of factors leads to change in the semantics of words. It also shows the nature, types and major tendencies of meaning changes in Amharic. Moreover, the book is an indicative of the fact that meaning change is systematic and regular. The book, in general, tries to exhibit the historical shift from older to modern Amharic in diachronic semantics. Besides, it explains to what extent lexical semantic changes in Amharic fit into known cross-linguistic patterns of diachronic semantics. This work, therefore, contributes to the study of Ethio-Semitic and the history of the Amharic language at large.