Do you know anyone named Buruk?

Amharic of the Day

This is difficult to follow verbally even when you know the original ancient Semitic tongues. Thank God for the written word. Variant spellings abound, so feel free to add them in the comments if you know them, but I have stumbled upon these: biruk, beruk, brook, buruk, boorook, baroukh, and barack. A smorgasbord of Hebrew, Arabic, and Ge’ez. And from Black English, I have stumbled across a couple Blessings.

There is no standardized transliteration from ge’ez to the latin script. And each language which uses the latin script (English, French, Portuguese, Italian, German etc.) has its own unique logic. This is why habesha names come in so many different shapes and flavors. I think Arabic and Hebrew have a little more standardization than us, but they too have this problem. Case in point, a holiday my first name shares a consonantal root with, Hanukah/Chanukkah/Khanukah.

Nevertheless, I strive to influence the youth to primarily learn their native script (for which there is no satisfactory substitute), and secondarily to come up with things that make sense for their context. My context is generally the English speaking world, and specifically the American language. Consonants should be noncontroversial, but I still see a few of you all spelling ቀ (q) with a k. Unacceptable. And yet, I am grateful for the progress I have seen. I have changed many minds on this one. The classic example I give is that qebero (red jackal) and kebero (afroasiatic kettledrum) should be spelled recognizably differently in the American language.

Sometimes, in the native scripts or in transliteration, a spelling error doesn’t make a difference. My baba likes to say qwanqwa megbabeeya new, “language is a means of communication”. That was his historic way of brushing off my critical-thinking on the subject. From his POV my overphilosophication and incessant interrogations of him. The worst insult he or my mom or any habesha adult could throw at me was to call me ferenj “foreigner”. Through spite, I honed my amharic mainly in the metropolis of Los Angeles, but with occasional immersion through visits to Ethiopia.

Sometimes, spelling changes the meaning of a word. There are two types of the letter a in Semtic tongues. There is alef and ayn. The alef is commonly transliterated as a. Funky stuff is done to convey the ayn, but my favorite is Arabic chat’s usage of the number 3. Is your third 3yn open yet? In ge’ez and amharic, amet means handmaiden or female slave.

Whereas 3met means twelve months or a year. We have another such scenario with our samech (isatu se) and shin (nigusu se). Here we have unique names. sereqe (with the isatu se) means to take, to steal. sereqe (with the nigusu se, and in ancient form likely shereqe) means to come out, to spring forth. Be careful.

Let’s bring it back to b-r-k and b-r-w-k and b-w-r-w-k. Ancient Semitic tongues don’t have vowels. That’s what we say for shorthand. That’s the TL;DR. The more complex factoid is that we have: a, 3, w, and y as vowels. The w represents all u/oo and o sounds. Perhaps why you have a double-u (w) in English…

The spelling mistake of having an i, e, or anything besides a u after the b in this blessed name, according to the ge’ez tradition, has dire consequences. The meaning changes drastically. biruk/beruk/brook in ge’ez means he who is on his brk (knees). Or he who bows down. Or he who has no legs. Please don’t say this about yahweh.

buruk/boorook means blessed. This is the meaning many diaspora (and sometimes native) parents are aiming for in selecting a name for their child in whom they are well-pleased. Just as autocorrect maybe the demon behind why myriads of habesha text me defiantly when they mean to say definitely, I believe I have found the source of this grave affront to the lord of hosts.

We have another word, whose spelling is the same in consonants, but differs in vowels. biruh: bright, lightened, illumined. We amharic speakers also have a habit of shifting the consonant k to the consonant h (i.e. kone becomes hone, and the first-person suffix for verbs goes from ku/koo to hu/hoo). Just like scholars attribute the Bronze Age Collapse to sundry factors, I attribute this error to more than one. Fix it.

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