Tigrinya

Geʽez held back written Tigrinya

For centuries Geʽez was the written language of the church and of rural learned circles, and Amharic was the language of the rulers. Carlo Conti Rossini blamed both for Tigrinya's thin written tradition. The Loggo Sarda law code was found tucked inside a Geʽez Gospel manuscript of the late 15th or early 16th century. Under British administration of Eritrea, the Ministry of Information printed a weekly Tigrinya newspaper that sold 5,000 copies at 5 cents each.

Tigrinya puts the main verb last, where Geʽez put it first, and it uses phrasal verbs. Its vocabulary is still 68% similar to that of Geʽez.

How its status changed with Eritrea's

Tigrinya and Arabic were official in Eritrea during its federation with Ethiopia. In 1958 Amharic replaced it, before annexation. At independence in 1991 Tigrinya kept its standing as a working language, and until 2020 Eritrea was the only state that officially recognised it. No dialect is accepted as standard, though books, films and news mostly use the Asmara dialect.

Which sounds tell Tigrinya apart

Tigrinya keeps the two pharyngeal consonants of Geʽez, which Amharic has lost, so it is easy to tell apart from Amharic by ear, though not from Tigre. Doubling a consonant can change a word's meaning, and the script does not show it: qärräbä, he approached, and qäräbä, he was near, are both written ቀረበ.