Talk:Fetha Negest

Select quotes and concepts from Fetha Nagast
This section is established to document select portions of the Fetha Nagast. DonaldRichardSands (talk) 21:59, 24 March 2012 (UTC)



"Correct name"?
This page was recently moved from Fetha Negest to Fetha Nagast with the assertion that it is the "correct" name. Anyone with some familiarity of Ge'ez, however, knows that the correct name is ፍትሐ ነገሥት which can be transliterated in a variety of ways, using a variety of methods. The second word means "kings" and the two vowels in that word are, in the method followed by classical linguists, most commonly transcribed as ä, a with two dots, even though the pronunciation of that vowel is more like English short e, so that the word would rhyme with "jest". Many typesetters, confronted with the symbol ä as written by linguists, would simply remove the two dots and transcribe it as a, which leads to the even more misleading transliteration "Nagast". It is misleading because the word is not at all pronounced as if it were "Nagast" nor should it be, and Negest is far more accurate for the actual pronunciation if you're not trying to confuse people. Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 12:31, 25 March 2012 (UTC)