ዕንጐት

Ge'ez

Alternative forms

ዕንጉት (ʿəngut)

Noun

ዕንጐት • (ʿəngʷät) (plural ዕንጐታት (ʿəngʷätat))

mountain plum (Ximenia americana)
- 15^th century manuscript, edited by Sylvain Grébaut, Les trois derniers traités du Livre des Mystères du ciel et de la terre [Book of the Mysteries of the Heaven and the Earth] (Patrologia Orientalis; 6.III (28)), Paris: Firmin-Didot et C^ie, published 1911, page 429 last line:
  እንጐታት፡ ፭ዘውእቱ፡ ትርንጕ
  ʾəngʷätat 5zäwʾətu tərnəgʷ
  Five mountain plums, comparable with citrons

Usage notes

In dictionaries it is, oblivious to the circumstance that it disharmonizes with the occurrence in the Book of the Mysteries of the Heaven and the Earth amongst the fruits Adam had in paradise, given as “mandrake” because in the Ethiopic Bible it is employed to translate Ancient Greek μανδραγόρας (mandragóras), a plant widespread in the Mediterranean but hardly Ethiopia, and alternatively “citron” because glossed in a Geʿez-Amharic vocabulary with ትርንጎ (tərəngo), which is of little authority considering that even the 1957 Tigrinya Bible translates Hebrew דּוּדָאִים (dūḏāʾīm) in the Song of Solomon 7 and 8 with ትርንጒ (tərəngʷi, literally “citron”), and the same yet glosses with another plant-name ዕንጎታት (ʿəngotat), in 2024 a hapax on first glance, but Dillmann adds that he does not know whether it is to be equated to እንኮይ (ʾənkoy), a word in the 19th century understood roughly as “wild plum” or even “apple” (so Praetorius, Franz (1879) Die amharische Sprache (in German), Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, page 76 § 50g, who no less tries to etymologize the Amharic word as containing a preformant treated at Praetorius, Franz (1879) Die amharische Sprache (in German), Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, page 156 § 123a), however it seems to be even the cognate to the Geʿez word since the word እንኮይ (ʾənkoy) variates with a labial እንኰይ (ʾənkʷäy), both now known as Ximenia americana, though used to roughly translate the European concepts of a “plum”.

References

Dillmann, August (1865) “ዕንጐት”, in Lexicon linguae aethiopicae cum indice latino (in Latin), Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, column 993
Leslau, Wolf (1991) Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez (Classical Ethiopic), 2nd edition, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, →ISBN, page 64b
“ዕንጐት”, in Ancient Ethiopic TraCES Corpus (of Beta maṣāḥǝft), Hamburg, 2014–2019