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Weyto language

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Languages

   The Weyto language is believed to be an extinct language formerly
   spoken in the Lake Tana region of Ethiopia by a small group of
   hippopotamus hunters who now speak Amharic.

   The Weyto language was first mentioned by the Scottish traveler James
   Bruce, who spoke Amharic, passed through the area about 1770 and
   reported that "the Wayto 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 them, 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 sung a song (sadly unrecorded) "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.

   This Amharic dialect is described by Marcel Cohen (1939) as featuring a
   fair number of words derived from Amharic roots but twisted in sound or
   meaning in order to confuse outsiders, making it a sort of argot; in
   addition to these, it had a small number of Cushitic loanwords not
   found in standard Amharic, and a large number of Arabic loanwords
   mainly related to Islam. Of the substantial wordlist collected by
   Griaule, Cohen only considered six terms to be etymologically obscure:
   šəlkərít "fish-scale", qəntat "wing", čəgəmbit "mosquito", annessa
   "shoulder", ^ənk^ies "hippopotamus thigh", wazəməs "hippopotamus
   spine." By 1965, the visiting anthropologist Frederick Gamst found "no
   surviving native words, not even relating to their hunting and fishing
   work tasks." (Gamst 1965.)

   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 Agaw language or a non-Amharic Semitic
   language, while Dimmendaal (1989) says it "probably belonged to
   Cushitic" (as does Agaw), and Gamst (1965) says "...it can be assumed
   that if the Wäyto did not speak Amharic 200 years ago, their language
   must have been Agäw..." According to the Ethnologue, Bender et al.
   (1976) saw it as Cushitic, while Bender 1983 saw it as either Eastern
   Sudanic or Awngi. It thus effectively remains unclassified, largely for
   lack of data, but possibly related to Agaw.

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