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Introductory Grammar of Amharic. By WOLF LESLAU. Porta Linguarum Orientalium, vol. 21. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2000. Pp. xix + 232. DM 98 (paper).
The work under review is the latest addition to Harrassowitz's well-known Porta Linguarum Orientalium series, edited by Werner Diem and Franz Rosenthal, which has given us such fine grammars as Rosenthal's Biblical Aramaic, Heinz Grotzfeld's Syrian Arabic, Wolfdietrich Fischer's Classical Arabic, and Joshua Blau's Biblical Hebrew. The aim is to present to beginning students the grammar of Amharic, Ethiopia's national language. Thus, it is quite different from the author's encyclopedic Reference Grammar of Amharic (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1995), written for general linguists and specialists in Ethio-Semitic, and much more similar in scope and orientation to Leslau's Amharic Textbook (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1968). Leslau tells us in the introduction (p. xv) that while a student at the University of Vienna in 1926 he tried to study Amharic using Franz Praetorius' Die amharische Sprache (1879); however, he found that volume unsuitable.
The section on phonology (pp. 1-16)...