When a goldsmith creates a ring or any other piece of jewelry in gold, the form is first carved in wax, because this material is soft and easy to carve; then is covered with clay or plaster. When the cover hardens, the goldsmith pours the melted gold into the clay mold, the wax that is inside melts away leaving behind the form in solid gold.
In the same way in "Qïne", a traditional Ethiopian form of language, a person says something when in fact he means something totally different in the same sentence. Qïne can be expressed in prose or in poetic form and it also has two parts: "säm" (wax) and "wärk" (gold). The great masters of Qïne, knew how to hide messages in the poems they recited where they seem they were saying one thing when actually they meant the opposite.
Amharic is special for this kind of use of language because many verbs have double or triple meaning due to their variations and also because of gemination, were the pronunciation of some consonants is prolonged. One of the masters of this genre was Alaqa Gabra and one of his most known stories is the one that tells that one day Alaqa met a peasant traveling with his donkey and politely greeted him "How did you sleep?". Only later the man realized that Alaqa used the plural form of "you" and not the singular, treating the owner as well as the animal as equals.

Much of Qïne depends on the fact that the words have more than one meaning or that they can be interpreted in more than one way and this can also happen in other languages. But in Amharic there is no symbol for accents as there is in other languages, so a word can be pronounced with small variations according to where you put the stress, changing in this way the meaning. Another technique del Qïne is that sometimes two or more words can be joined together or just the opposite, a word can be parted in various words to change the meaning.
Of course all these subtleties get lost in translation and besides you need to master the language to be able to understand them in the original.
Qïne became popular in the 18th century as part of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church liturgy. It was composed in the monasteries and then dramatized in the church with the help of a choir of musicians.
In certain way, this kind of use of the language trascends the linguistic domain and extends to the whole Ethiopian culture..
For more examples:  A brief introduction to Qene . 

 
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