I love the way that many Ethiopian’s miss out important words in sentences or rearrange words in a sentence so that they have a completely different meaning to what they intended! Here are just a few examples of things people have said to me today...
· ‘Fine you are’ and also ‘you are fine’ (instead of ‘How are you?). I wanted to reply ‘Thank you’ because it does seem a bit big-headed to agree with them that I am ‘fine’ but I think that would really confuse them.
· Where are you? (when I pass someone in the street- I think they meant to ask, ‘where are you going?’) I always want to reply ‘here’. I also had today ‘Where you are’ phrased as a question to me... I really didn’t know how to respond to that one!
· Are you here? ... Really? (When I bumped into a colleague I hadn’t seen for a while)....ummm... yes?!
· ‘How was your picnic?’ (Instead of ‘how was your visit [to the north of Ethiopia]’)
I know I really shouldn’t laugh, especially as my Amharic is a million times worse than the above sentences, but sometimes it is little things like this that make your day!
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do they make these mistakes because that's how they would phrase the question in Amharic? We find that with Spaniards and it's really helped us with our Spanish actually! For example, when the Spanish want to say "give me" they often say "put me" - so we have to remember to say "poneme" when we translate the other way round!
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