So, I've been trying to figure out what Melat's name means, and nobody has been able to tell me. One web site said it meant "Purple" but Ethiopians that I know thought that wasn't right. I also doubted the accuracy since the word "purple" wasn't spelled right. Everyone I've asked thought it was a word that related to royalty, but maybe not purple (a historic color associated with royalty throughout the world).
In preparation for my travels, I used amazon.com and ordered up a Amharic phrasebook and an Amharic-English dictionary, thinking it might be helpful during those awkward communication moments. Tonight, I sat down to look up "purple" in the English section and was surprised not to find it. In fact, I didn't find any of the colors, not even listed under color. (am I missing something?)
Amharic has a totally different alphabet. I sat down with my refernce books and discovered that there are 33 different letters, but that each one has a variation that looks a little different based on the five possible following vowel sounds. (I wish I'd paid more attention in English class when they taught about reading phonetic markigns).
After much flipping back and forth between two books, I finally found the right variaion of "M" with the proper next sound and voila, the whole phonetic pronounciation matched, so I think her name means "abundance" which is close to the "royalty" kind of association that my Ethiopian friends thought it might have.
This is such a cool language--I hope to learn a lot more about it during my travels. Sentence structure is a lot like French, Spanish and Portugese with the subject first--which is very nice for people to listen to a language they aren't used to--at least you can usually figure out what they're talking about--even if you don't know what they're saying about it.
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