Gawwada is a member of the so-called Dullay dialect cluster and is spoken in South-West Ethiopia (administratively, a part of the “Southern Peoples, Nations, and Nationalities Regional State;” SPNNR).
Dullay has gained wider acceptance in the linguistic literature and will be retained here, although it must be stressed that none of these denominations bears any meaning to the speakers themselves. The Dullay dialects are not endangered. Bi- and multilingualism involves first of all Amharic, then Konso and other Konsoid varieties.
Following the companion grammar of Gawwada (Tosco 2021), this dictionary, too, follows the principle of maximal decomposability: each lexical item is transcribed, glossed and analyzed as composed of the maximal possible number of morphemes, meaningful lexical or grammatical units.
The morphological make up of a word is shown using the conventions of the Grammar (Tosco 2021); e.g., ʔar-amp-akk-o ‘wise’ is glossed as “(n., qual-sing-m),” i.e., a noun made up by a root (left unglossed) and followed by a Qualificative, a Singulative and a Masculine affix. The word is also co-referenced (with ☛) to its root, the verb ʔar-a ‘to know.’
Within an entry, each meaning is separated by a digit; of course, what counts as separate meanings is a matter we cannot enter here and much less try to resolve; thus, a highly polysemous word as pak-o receives the following six translations:
① mouth; ② beak; ③ language; ④ mouth of a container; ⑤ edge; ⑥ side.
All six meanings are entered separately in the English-Gawwada part of the dictionary.
Whenever possible, meanings are cross-referenced with the 1,460 lexemes of the Loanword Typology database (Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009; LWT in the dictionary), based in its turn on the list of the Intercontinental Dictionary Series. The Gawwada data for the Loanword Typology database was presented in Tosco (2009).
Completing this dictionary, A Grammar of Gawwada (Tosco 2021) has been published by us, as well as a grammar of another language of the Dullay cluster, see the links below:
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