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sawt_table

This post is brought to you by the letter: sawt1

 The fifth symbol of the Amharic alphabet is called ŚÄWT and its pronunciation is like an S. The printed letter is like two symbols hoy1 joined side by side, like a rounded W. The handwritten letter looks just the same.

In Feedel there are two S that sound the same, sawt1 or fifth symbol and  s or seventh symbol. As I said before, even when they sound the same, their used is based on the way they were used in the language Geez, and its a question of tradition and preference. The symbolsawt1 is the least used of the two S, that is why I included just examples of the most used words. To differentiate them, they have different names:

sawt1sä nïgus ssä ïsat

Here is the table with the printed letter, handwritten letter and pronunciation, an a few examples. The animations were made according to the instructions in the book Writing and Reading Amharic and the sounds are form the site Amharic Online. Phonetic according to David Appleyard.

 

print
phonetics
how to write it
and say it
examples
sawt1
salasa (sälasa) thirty
sawt2
su
 
sawt3
si
siso (siso) one-third
sawt4
sa
saqa 
(sakä) laugh
sawt5
se
 
 
sawt6
(just s at the end of a word)
sesset 
(sïssït) greed
sawt7
so
sost 
(sost) three

Finally all the sequence in alphabetical order :
sawt
Here is the quiz for the fifth letter of the alphabet:

Quiz # 5

Next week, the letter R.

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