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Showing posts from July, 2010

Words

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T drinking ' wah ' at Horizon House's Big Kids Guest House I kept saying that I needed to write down all Teshale's Sidamic words before he stopped using them and I forgot them. I might be past that point. He rarely speaks anything but English now, and I don't know that I can possibly remember all the words he used to use, and that we learned to understand. He doesn't even remember some of his first language words now. At any rate, this is as good a place as any to document his first language. It's a bit tricky, because his first language was Sidamic , but when he was moved to Horizon House, he had to learn Amharic, and in some cases we don't know whether his words were Sidamic or Amharic. Selam : Hello. Amharic is one of the Semitic languages, which includes Hebrew and Arabic, among others, hence their 'hello' is similar to 'Shalom' in Hebrew. People were kind when we said 'hello' in English, but their faces lit up if we greete