Teddy Afro

Teddy Afro (Amharic: ቴዲ አፍሮ^?; real name: Tewodros Kassahun, Amharic: ቴዎድሮስ ካሳሁን^?, born 14 July 1976) is an Ethiopian singer and one of the most popular artists in Ethiopia.

Career

In 2001, Teddy Afro released his second album, Abugida, named after the Abugida syllabary of the Ge'ez language. Several tracks quickly caught the ear of many listeners in Ethiopia - "Halieselassie", a tribute to the late Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie I; "Haile, Haile", a single in honor of the Olympic long distance champion Haile Gebrselassie; and "Mona Lisa", a song about the measure of human beauty.

His third album, Yasteseryal, was released in 2005. The release of this album coincided with elevated political tension in Ethiopia surrounding the Ethiopian general election, 2005. His politically and socially inspired songs acted as a call for unity and peace and made the 17 years of TPLF-led government in power concerned. Consequently the government banned four songs including "Yasteseryal" from playing on radios and TV. The most popular song of the album "Yasetseryal" claims that there is no real change in Ethiopia but a new government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) fight against the Derg was nothing but an infamous military junta. The album sold more than a million copies within a few months after its release, becoming the biggest selling Ethiopian music album to date.

Abugida

An abugida /ˌɑːbuːˈɡiːdə/ (from Ge'ez አቡጊዳ ’äbugida), and likewise an alphasyllabary, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary. This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is absent or optional. (In less formal contexts, all three types of script may be termed alphabets.) The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which the symbols cannot be split into separate consonants and vowels. Abugidas include the extensive Brahmic family of scripts of South and Southeast Asia.

As is the case for syllabaries, the units of the writing system may consist of the representations both of syllables and of consonants. For scripts of the Brahmic family, the term akshara is used for the units.

Abugida as a term in linguistics was proposed by Peter T. Daniels in his 1990 typology of writing systems.’Abugida is an Ethiopian name for the Ge‘ez script, taken from four letters of that script, 'ä bu gi da, in much the same way that abecedary is derived from Latin a be ce de, and alphabet is derived from the names of the two first letters in the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. As Daniels used the word, an abugida is in contrast with a syllabary, where letters with shared consonants or vowels show no particular resemblance to one another, and also with an alphabet proper, where independent letters are used to denote both consonants and vowels. The term alphasyllabary was suggested for the Indic scripts in 1997 by William Bright, following South Asian linguistic usage, to convey the idea that "they share features of both alphabet and syllabary."

Writing system

A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable form of information storage and transfer. The processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script. Writing is usually recorded onto a durable medium, such as paper or electronic storage, although non-durable methods may also be used, such as writing on a computer display, in sand, or by skywriting.

The general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category. In the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters (basic written symbols or graphemes) of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters (or letter pair/groups) represent speech sounds. In a syllabary, each symbol correlates to a syllable or mora. In a logography, each character represents a word, morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, and abugidas or alphasyllabaries, with each character representing a consonant–vowel pairing. Alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have several hundreds of symbols.