Verbs of change in Amharic

Acta linguistica Petropolitana. 2026. Vol. 22. No. 1. P. 567–614.

Fridman I., Bulakh M., Aragaw B. S.

Amharic is spoken by approximately 31.8 million people in Ethiopia as the first language. The aim of the paper is to give a detailed semantic and syntactic analysis of Amharic verbs denoting various situations within the semantic field of change.The present investigation is based, in the first place, on the examples produced by Bellete Sisay as a native speaker of Amharic. His translations of the key sentences into Amharic were supplemented with the translations provided by Fentahun Mihret Asmare, a resident of Bahir Dar, who represents a younger generation of Amharic native speakers. Occasionally, other speakers of Amharic were consulted. In addition to the elicited examples, evidence from Amharic web corpus was used. All the core frames of change can be covered by two default verbs of change, namely, läwwäṭä and qäyyärä. They can be described as quasi-synonyms (qäyyärä having an additional application in the frame of displacing). The indigenous verb is läwwäṭä, whereas qäyyärä, an Arabic loan relatively rarely used in 19th – 20th cent., is steadily expanding its employment in the recent decades and successfully competing with the older läwwäṭä.

Keywords: лексическая типология, амхарский язык, quasi-synonymy, квазисинонимия, Amharic language, lexical typology

Publication based on the results of: From Antiquity to Modernity: Epistemology of the Development of Spiritual and Material Cultures in Non-Western Societies (2025)