Afaan Oromoo Books

Tag: linguistics

  • Learning English (for speakers of afaan Oromoo)

    “How do I learn English?” This is probably the question that I get the most when I am speaking with others. In Ethiopia, like many places in the world, the ability to speak English opens up different job opportunities and is often a requirement to further your education. At the same time, outside of major…

  • Reading a Dictionary

    I have not died, but I have been unordinarily sick these last three months. I have returned from my trip to Ethiopia with a handful of new books but I have also started going through a dictionary. Reading a dictionary may not seem like the most fun but it is enjoyable so far. I have…

  • Academic Work

    This topic of academic work touches on a lot of different resources but all of which come back to being academic studies. These are mostly not published or are freely available outside of being published. This means that it is a lot of articles in academic journals or masters or doctoral work, either theses or…

  • Afaan Oromoo Wikipedia

    This title doesn’t exactly hide that I am going to talk about Wikipedia today. The afaan Oromoo Wikipedia is not a robust Wikipedia. Many topics are missing and many articles are relatively short descriptions. Obviously, this is less good if trying to use the website as an actual way to gain knowledge. But, many of…

  • Lehrbuch des Oromo by Catherine Griefenow-Mewis and Tameme Bitima

    It has been a very busy month between work and an online workshop (where I focused on afaan Oromoo as my topic). Hopefully it will not be so long in the future. Today, I am going to start looking at Catherine Griefenow-Mewis and Tameme Bitima’s Lehrbuch des Oromo. My German is not great but this…

  • Reported Speech

    In general, I dislike reported speech. It isn’t horrible but even for native speakers it isn’t impossible to lose track of exactly who it was that performed the actions. For speakers of afaan Oromoo as a second language, people are not always forgiving of mistakes in considering how well someone speaks. The example from stood…

  • Dialect Differences

    Afaan Oromoo is spoken across a wide area of east Africa. There are maybe common features that have been identified but an official dialect has not been created or confirmed for things written in the language. These differences can be like preference for certain words or sentence structures but the other option is allowed or…

  • Newspaper Reader Selection One: Jaha Dhalte

    The first selection in the Oromo Newspaper Reader is about a sheep giving birth to six lambs. This is a great book as I said, as every single word is explained in depth. For me now it is relatively easy but a beginner might be wondering why they see lamaa being used in a sentence…

  • And also…

    Today a relatively short post to start the day and maybe a longer one later. From reading Kibbeefi Waaqoo you see a lot of –is constructions in rhe sentences. This like; Waarituunis, isaanis, ilkaanis appear often at the start of sentences. The addition of -is to these words implies an “and also” meaning to the…

  • The Focus Marker

    Now I would like to talk a little about focus markers. This also touches on the subject of different dialects of afaan Oromoo. I would like to look at focus markers that are used with the predicate, specifically nan, hin, in, and ni. Although, some dialects may differ, these markers are used usually directly before…