---
title: "Rhetoric Means of a Didactic Amharic Poem from Wärrä Babbo"
description: "The paper examines ajäm, the practice among Ethiopian Muslims of writing Amharic and other local languages in Arabic script. 31 references."
authors: ["Andreas Wetter"]
year: 2013
venue: "Aethiopica 15"
source: "https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/aethiopica/article/view/665"
doi: "10.15460/aethiopica.15.1.665"
licence: "CC BY-SA (journal licence per DOAJ; Aethiopica)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/wetter-2013-rhetoric-means-didactic-amharic-poem/"
---
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# Rhetoric Means of a Didactic Amharic Poem from Wärrä Babbo

**Authors:** Andreas Wetter · **Year:** 2013 · **Venue:** [Aethiopica 15](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/aethiopica/) ([Aethiopica 2013](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/aethiopica/2013/)) · **Publisher:** [Hamburg University Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/hamburg-university-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-SA (journal licence per DOAJ; Aethiopica)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.15460/aethiopica.15.1.665) · [PDF](https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/aethiopica/article/download/665/673) · [DOI 10.15460/aethiopica.15.1.665](https://doi.org/10.15460/aethiopica.15.1.665) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1520643914)

**Citations:** 2 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper examines ajäm, the practice among Ethiopian Muslims of writing Amharic and other local languages in Arabic script. Wetter first places this tradition within the wider Muslim world and Africa, where Hausa and Swahili are the best-known cases. He then surveys what is known for Ethiopian languages and finds that, except for Harari, the material is barely documented and largely unpublished. The core of the study is a didactic religious poem on tawḥīd in a manuscript from Wärrä Babbo in Wällo. Using transliterated and translated verses, he looks at how the author persuades and instructs his readers: imperative forms, direct address, intensifying words, and contrasts between forbidden and recommended behaviour. The analysis shows that the poet relies on a small, systematic set of rhetorical devices to sound close and familiar while still sounding urgent. Wetter ends by calling for philological documentation that brings in local scholars, ethnography and history, and compares Ethiopian ajäm with other African traditions.

## Key points
- Ajäm texts are reported for ʿAfar, Alaaba, Amharic, Argobba, Harari, Oromo, Silṭe and Tigrinya. For three of these (Alaaba, ʿAfar, Tigrinya), the author knows them only through personal communication.
- Between 2002 and 2006 the author scanned about 1,000 pages of manuscripts in southern Wällo and Addis Ababa, none of them published yet. He also copied a 348-page Oromo ajäm manuscript from Wällo.
- In the poem, 30 verses contain imperatives. Exactly half address one person and half address a group, and 11 of the 30 are negative, mostly warnings or reminders not to forget the teaching.
- Recurring devices include:
  - addressing the reader as "my friend";
  - the formula "let me tell you";
  - intensifiers such as bäṭam "very";
  - the Arabic loan bä-niyyah "with intent";
  - an imperative of the Arabic loan meaning "teach", which tells readers to pass the lesson on to others.
- Philology teaching started at Addis Ababa University in 2004, and some M.A. theses on local Islamic literature have followed. Even so, the field is still at its very beginning.

## Interesting ideas
- The author describes rhetoric quantitatively by counting directive verbs and splitting them by grammatical number (one addressee or many) and by polarity (do or don't); a small numeric profile like this turns a vague sense of "persuasive style" into checkable figures.
- Address terms such as "my friend" are read as tools for building closeness between speaker and audience, not as empty filler; vocatives encode the social relation the text is trying to create.
- The poem often pairs a ban with a substitute ("stop X, do Y"; "don't sing, study instead"), so the meaning comes from the contrast between a rejected act and a preferred one.
- Wetter argues that texts still in active use should be interpreted together with community experts, because local and historical references are otherwise opaque.

## For Mova

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

- **I1** (frames): prag could produce a per-text profile of directive speech acts, broken down by addressee number and negation, as an explainable signal of advisory or didactic texts.
- **I2** (frames): vocatives and phrases like "let me tell you" could be tagged as relationship and stance markers attached to the speech-act frame, which would help separate advice from command.
- **I3** (world): representing such pairs as a forbidden-versus-recommended relation between two events would let the reader answer "what should one do instead?" questions on fables and moral tales.
- **I4** (learn): evaluation sets for culturally loaded texts could include human expert readings as a separate check, instead of relying only on the agreement of witness parsers or LLM teachers.

*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: Andreas Wetter. 2013. Rhetoric Means of a Didactic Amharic Poem from Wärrä Babbo. Aethiopica 15.

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{wetter2013rhetoric,
  title = {{Rhetoric Means of a Didactic Amharic Poem from Wärrä Babbo}},
  author = {Andreas Wetter},
  booktitle = {Aethiopica 15},
  year = {2013},
  doi = {10.15460/aethiopica.15.1.665},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.15460/aethiopica.15.1.665}
}
```

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- [↑ back to papers of 2013](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2013/page/3/)

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*Updated 30 October 2026*