User:MichaelGasser/draft6

Consonant and vowel phonemes
Tigre has a fairly typical set of consonant phonemes for an Ethiopian Semitic language, including the set of ejective consonants. Like Tigrinya, Tigre has preserved the two pharyngeal consonants which were apparently part of the ancient Ge'ez language. Tigre also has the set of seven vowels characteristic of Ethiopian Semitic, with one key difference: the distinction between the two vowels which are phonetically close to [ɐ] (traditionally the "first order vowel" and ä in the most common transcription system) and [a] in languages such as Tigrinya and Amharic is in Tigre more a matter of length than of quality: [a] vs. [].

The charts below show the phonemes of Tigre.

For the representation of Tigre sounds, this article uses a modification of a system that is common (though not universal) among linguists who work on Ethiopian Semitic languages, but it differs somewhat from the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet. For the long vowel, the symbol "ā" is used, in agreement with Raz's book. When the IPA symbol is different, it is indicated in brackets in the charts.

Gemination
Gemination is significant in Tigre. That is, consonant length can distinguish words from one another. Although gemination plays a significant role in verb morphology, it is usually accompanied by other features, and there are few pairs of Tigrinya words that are distinguished only by gemination:

All consonants except the pharyngeal and glottal consonants can geminate.

Syllables
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Orthography
Tigre is usually written in the Ge'ez, or Ethiopic, writing system, originally developed for the now-extinct Ge'ez language. In order to view the Ethiopic characters below, you will need a Unicode Ge'ez font, such as GF Zemen Unicode. The Ge'ez writing system is an abugida: each symbol represents a consonant+vowel syllable, and the symbols are organized in groups of similar symbols both on the basis of the consonant and the vowel. In the table below the columns are assigned to the seven vowels of Tigre; they appear in the traditional order. The rows are assigned to the consonants, again in the traditional order. For each consonant in an abugida, there is an unmarked symbol representing that consonant followed by a canonical vowel. For the Ge'ez abugida, this canonical vowel is /ä/, the first column in the table. However, since the pharyngeal and glottal consonants of Tigrinya (and other Ethiopian Semitic languages) cannot be followed by this vowel, the symbols in the first column in the rows for those consonants are pronounced with the vowel /a/, exactly as in the fourth row. These redundant symbols are falling into disuse in Tigrinya and are shown with a gray background in the table. When it is necessary to represent a consonant with no following vowel, the consonant+ form is used (the symbol in the sixth column). For example, the word  'what?' is written እንታይ, literally.

Since some of the distinctions that were apparently made in Ge'ez have been lost in Tigre, there are two rows of symbols each for the consonants /h/, /s/, and /s'/.

The orthography does not mark gemination, ...

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