---
title: "Grammaticalization of qәl ‘gourd’ in Amharic — Gensler 2020"
description: "Gensler traces how the Amharic noun qəl, whose basic meaning is 'gourd, calabash', became a grammatical marker. 17 references."
authors: ["Orin D. Gensler"]
year: 2020
venue: "Afrika und Übersee 93"
source: "https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/hup1/afrikaunduebersee/article/view/212"
doi: "10.15460/auue.2020.93.1.212"
licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Afrika und Übersee)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/gensler-2020-grammaticalization-ql-gourd-amharic/"
---
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# Grammaticalization of qәl ‘gourd’ in Amharic

**Authors:** Orin D. Gensler · **Year:** 2020 · **Venue:** Afrika und Übersee 93 · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Afrika und Übersee)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.15460/auue.2020.93.1.212) · [PDF](https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/hup1/afrikaunduebersee/article/download/212/122) · [DOI 10.15460/auue.2020.93.1.212](https://doi.org/10.15460/auue.2020.93.1.212) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3208619751)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
Gensler traces how the Amharic noun qəl, whose basic meaning is 'gourd, calabash', became a grammatical marker. This is an unusual case, because plant words rarely start grammaticalization chains. The evidence comes from:
- dictionary and reference-grammar material (Kane 1990, Leslau 1995),
- cognates across Transversal South Ethiopic,
- one attested written passage.

He reconstructs a two-step path. First, a metaphor based on shape and hardness turned 'gourd' into 'skull/head'. That 'head' sense then grammaticalized into an Intensive Reflexive ('he himself'), which later froze into optional emphatic particles in temporal, conditional and concessive clauses.

The puzzle is a contrast with ras, the ordinary word for 'head'. Ras already served as a Plain Reflexive ('killed himself') in Ge'ez, but qəl never took that role. The author gives three reasons:
- ras already occupied that slot;
- a 'head' word derived from 'gourd' had an expressive flavour that fits emphasis;
- most importantly, qəl was attracted to gəll 'separate, own', an unrelated but similar-sounding word that also never works as a Plain Reflexive.

The paper's main claim is that accidental sound resemblance between morphemes can steer meaning change. The grammaticalization literature has rarely considered this factor.

## Key points
- Cognates meaning 'gourd' exist in Argobba qäli, Harari quluʼ, Silt'i qula/qila, Wolane quli and Soddo qəl, but not in Ge'ez. The word is therefore reconstructed for Proto-TSE, and only Amharic adds the 'head' sense.
- qəl has four grammatical uses:
  - Intensive Reflexive (əssu qəl-u 'he himself');
  - distributive 'separately' (bä-yyä-qəl);
  - frozen 3ms qəl-u as an optional intensifier in 'when', 'even if' and 'even though' clauses;
  - none as a Plain Reflexive.
  
  All of these uses are rare and mostly written.
- ras-u 'his head' is the common Plain Reflexive, inherited from Ge'ez rə's-u, and it can also act as an intensive.
- gəll comes from the root g-l-l 'set apart'. It always needs a preposition (yä-, lä-, bä-, bä-yyä-) and expresses 'own', the intensive and 'separately', but never the plain reflexive.
- Cited parallels:
  - Hup teg 'stick' developed into a nominalizer, then a purpose marker, then a future marker.
  - Kilivila bwa/kai and Chinese shù/gè, each pair meaning 'tree', became different classifiers.
  - Amharic's monosyllabic qəl was easier to grammaticalize than the two-syllable cognates elsewhere.

## Interesting ideas
- One surface form can serve as a Plain Reflexive (an argument) or an Intensive Reflexive (an emphasizer), and the two must be told apart by function.
- A form-by-function grid (morphemes as rows, readings as columns) shows at a glance which forms can fill which functions and where the gaps are.
- When a function is already taken by one form, a newcomer tends to specialize into a neighbouring, more marked niche rather than duplicate it.
- Fixed inflected forms (frozen 3ms qəl-u) can lose their agreement meaning and behave as invariant particles, much like 'self' > 'even' in German and French.
- Expressive, metaphor-laden words come across as stronger and therefore suit emphatic functions.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (frames): English "himself" has the same split ("hit himself" vs "he himself came"), so prag should only assign a semantic role to the argument reading and treat the emphatic one as focus.
- **I2** (learn): build similar grids for function words and check that silver data and parser output cover each cell, with empty cells serving as negative controls.
- **I3** (learn): self-induced repair rules could be checked for redundancy against existing rules, so new ones target uncovered cases instead of overlapping.
- **I4** (tokens): the morphology layer could flag frozen inflected items in multiword connectives (e.g., "even though") so lemmas and features are not over-analysed.
- **I5** (back): generation could reserve more vivid or marked variants for contexts where the meaning graph marks emphasis or contrast.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Orin D. Gensler. 2020. Grammaticalization of qәl ‘gourd’ in Amharic. Afrika und Übersee 93.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{gensler2020grammaticalization,
  title = {{Grammaticalization of qәl ‘gourd’ in Amharic}},
  author = {Orin D. Gensler},
  booktitle = {Afrika und Übersee 93},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.15460/auue.2020.93.1.212},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.15460/auue.2020.93.1.212}
}
```

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## References

17 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 23 October 2026*