Pronunciation

Words in Amharic present a considerable challenge to pronounce without spitting your tongue out of your mouth. The other day when I asked our driver about the movie Teza, he had no idea what I was talking about. "Never heard of it," he said. This morning he told me that he had read an article in the paper about the movie and now realized what I was talking about, and not to say "tease-ah" but "tay-za" with a plosive stress on the "t".
I tried it, "TTT-ay-za", almost spitting on myself. He repeated and I said it again, this time with less spittle. He nodded his head.
I then got a lightning-fast lesson in the letter T. There are seven sounds related to "t" in Amharic: Ta - Toe - Tu - Tay and so on. He gave me an example of each and told me what the words meant, such as "slanted roof of a house" or "a breast", and then Tay-za, which of course is "dew".
I brought the conversation back to the movie and, although he hadn't seen the movie, he also agreed there was some metaphor in the title; he was sure. I asked him to again describe the meaning of the word for "dew" and he said something that you can only see in the early morning and then is gone. Thinking about the movie a bit more, it might not be as much about hope as it is about losing the innocence of childhood. There were a number of scenes where Anberber, the main character, had nightmares that he was killed as a child and it tormented him to see young men from his village be taken away by rebel armies to fight for someone else's cause. Our driver then told me that the movie took something like 18 years to film and was released after Haile Gerima, the director, had passed away. So again, it's possible that the reference is to Haile himself, who is now gone like dew in the afternoon.