Under Arrest

Today in class, we learned an interesting new use for the phrase “under arrest” in Amharic. With only six weeks of class remaining (now only three left), we asked our teachers if we could focus on one difficult grammatical structure each week. The first week it was “compound gerunds” which function as “present perfect” tense verbs, or in other words a past action which has results that continue to the present - “I have eaten” as opposed to “I ate.” After spending a week on this form, we are feeling better about using them and now they actually pop into our conversations every now and then. Last week was conditional clauses, or “if…then” statements. There are three different types of these in Amharic, and although we still aren’t great at them, we can squeak a few out in life when needed. This week is relative clauses, as in the sentence – the ice cream “that we made last night” was delicious (yea, ice cream is still on the brain from the last blog!). So today, having seen progress in our relative clause formation, our teacher excitedly responded with what could literally be translated, “by Friday you will have the relative clauses under arrest!” Upon inquiry, we learned that this is the normal way to say that we have mastered something. It’s always fun to find unique uses of words, even though we disagree with her comment.

 

To truly put the relative clause or any other pesky element of the Amharic language “under arrest” feels like an unreachable goal most of the time. It isn’t a joke when Amharic is ranked up with Chinese as one of the most difficult languages in the world. Why? What makes it so difficult? The verbs. Amharic is a language that puts their verbs at the very end of the sentence. For example, a long sentence literally translated into English might be “Yesterday afternoon the big hairy dog the man’s left leg who at the school next to my house teaches with his dirty tail repeatedly hit.” So as this sentence enters our brains, nouns, prepositional phrase and elements pile up in our mind, without clearly finding their meaning with relation to each other until the verb comes along. That’s annoying. But then once the verb does come, there can be many, many little morphemes (or word pieces) slapped onto it in order to give it person, number, gender, tense, mood, etc. For example, let’s look at the basic verb tenagere, which means “he spoke.” Using this root, in one word (kaltenegagerachulachom) I can say “if you guys (or yall) do not speak to each other in behalf of them…” Let me break that down for you. ke-al-tenegagere -achu-le-acho-m

 

“ke”=if

“al”= negation part 1

“tenagere”=he spoke, but “tenegageru”=they spoke to each other (reciprocal)

“achu” =  second-person plural, (you, yall) simple past tense verb suffix

“le”= dative of advantage (speaking in BEHALF of _______)

“acho” = third person plural direct object suffix (them)

“m” = negation part 2

 

Believe it or not, Andrea and I are getting to the point where we can produce verbs like this (if given enough time) and we can understand them when we hear them (once again, given enough time); but to actually put them under arrest in the prison of our everyday speech, there is a long journey ahead, and though our class will end in three weeks, the finish line is most likely not right around the next bend.