From the original document found at : ftp://unicode.org/pub/TechReports/UTR_1.ascii * The Ethiopian proposal was written by Joe Becker. Ethiopian U+1200 U+125F Proposal for Ethiopian Encoding The Ethiopian proposal consists of a list of questions/issues, a chart, a character names list, and a block introduction. The content is based on UTC/1991-026 On the Extended Ethiopic Alphabet of February 26, 1991 and its later adjustments by Lloyd Anderson, unioned with features of the Xerox Amharic implementation by Joe Becker. The character names are based on those in DP 10646, which came from WG2/N459 "Ethiopian character sets" by Michael Mann. QUESTIONS FOR REVIEWERS: 1. Is this collection missing any important, well-established "extension" letters for writing less-common languages? 2. Are the glyphs in the charts appropriate? 3. Can you supply documentation to support the specification of the following two characters? 121D ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT GG 1237 ETHIOPIAN VOWEL PHONETIC AE In particular, does U+1237 occur (as a vowel, not as a mark of "w" rounding) on any consonant other than U+1211? Should the combination of U+1237 with U+1211 simply be encoded as a distinct consonant (to be added between current U+1211 and U+1212)? 4. Are the following characters specified correctly? 1256 ETHIOPIAN COMMA modern usage like colon 1257 ETHIOPIAN COLON modern usage like semicolon 1259 ETHIOPIAN NEW COMMA modern usage 5. Do syllable glyph variants ever occur distinctively within the same text, or are they merely font design choices like the glyph variants of Latin "a" or "g"? ISSUES: * In this design, no provision is made for coding the syllable glyphs; it is intended that they be excluded from Unicode/10646 BMP. If we learn that glyph variants may occur distinctively, then we may need to define some additional means for specifying glyph variants within plain text. * Should we define an Ethiopian White Space character which can be easily guaranteed to have the same (minimum) width as U+1255 ETHIOPIAN WORDSPACE? Currently opinion is that this is unnecessary. Ethiopian (U+1200 -> U+125F) The Ethiopian script, which originally evolved for the archaic language Ge'ez, is currently used to write several languages of Eastern Africa, including Amharic, Tigre, and Oromo. The script continues to be extended for writing languages that have little tradition of printed typography; new characters to cover such extensions may added to the standard later as definitive information about them becomes available. Encoding Principles. The visible glyphs of the Ethiopian script are not the objects shown in the encoding chart. The elements of the encoding are the alphabet underlying the script, thus the encoding is (roughly) phonetic rather than glyphic. These alphabetic letters are expected to be the units of keyboard input and all text representation short of rendering. Rendering. Each visible glyph of the Ethiopian script represents a syllable rather than a single letter. The syllables can all be treated as simple (consonant + vowel) pairs, so that each glyph can be thought of as a ligature of two underlying letters. Thus the syllable "MA" would be represented in the encoding as U+1203 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT M plus U+1233 ETHIOPIAN VOWEL A. The syllable glyphs themselves are not intended to be incorporated in this encoding. The individual consonant or vowel codes should not be isolated (i.e. unpaired) in normal final text, and their rendering in such circumstances is an option of the implementation. One possibility is to use special symbols for the individual letters, as is done in the code charts here. Chart Symbols Representing Individual Letters. Since the Ethiopian glyphs are normally syllabic, the script provides no unambiguous way of representing the underlying individual letters. Therefore in the code charts and names list, a convention has been adopted in which consonant letters are represented by their "first" form surrounded by a dotted circle, and vowel letters are represented by a typical glyph fragment attached to a dotted circle. This is not intended to imply direct glyphic composition of those forms, but merely to signify the underlying letters. Encoding/Rendering of "First Form" Syllables. The circled consonants in the charts U+1200 -> U+1224 are underlying letters, they should not be confused with rendered full first form syllable glyphs. As with all glyphs in the script, the first form syllables are encoded as simple (consonant + vowel) pairs. Thus the glyph "MAE" would be represented in the encoding as U+1203 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT M plus U+1230 ETHIOPIAN VOWEL AE. This pair would then be rendered via a "ligature" MAE whose appearance would resemble the chart symbol for U+1203 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT M without the circle. Encoding/Rendering of Lone Consonants ("Sixth Form" Syllables). The sixth form syllable glyphs are sometimes pronounced as though they were lone consonants (i.e. the vowel is dropped in speech), but this does not change their encoding. As with all glyphs in the script, the sixth form syllables are encoded as simple (consonant + vowel) pairs. Thus the spoken lone consonant "M" would be represented in the encoding as U+1203 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT M plus U+1235 ETHIOPIAN VOWEL SCHWA. Variant Glyph Forms. The script sometimes provides different glyph forms to represent the same syllables. It is assumed that these alternatives do not vary freely, in other words that is appropriate for a given font to contain only one selected glyph form for each syllable. Therefore no mechanism is provided for specifying glyph variants within a plain text stream of characters. The situation is analogous to that of the glyph variants of Latin "a" or "g". Letter Names. The Ethiopian script often has multiple letters corresponding to the same Latin letter, making it difficult to assign unique Latin names. Therefore the names list makes use of certain devices (such as doubling a Latin letter in the name) merely to create uniqueness; this has no relation to the phonetics of the Ethiopian letters. Encoding Order and Sorting. The order of the letters in the encoding is based on the traditional alphabetical order. This order differs from the sort order used for one or another language, if only because in many languages various pairs or triplets of letters are treated as equivalent in the first sorting pass. For example, an Amharic dictionary is likely to start out with a section headed by three letters: U+1200 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT H U+1202 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT HH U+120E ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT X Thus the encoding order cannot and does not implement a collation procedure for any particular language using this script. Space Characters. The traditional word separator is U+1255 ETHIOPIAN WORDSPACE ( : ), but in modern usage a plain white wordspace is becoming common. The ASCII character U+0020 SPACE is suitable for the latter usage, although its (minimum) width is not guaranteed to be the same as that of the traditional wordspace. Diacritical Marks. The mark U+030E NON-SPACING DOUBLE VERTICAL LINE ABOVE may occasionally be used to indicate emphasis or gemination. If this or other diacritical marks are used, they follow the vowel letter of the syllable to which they apply. Encoding Structure. The Unicode block for the Ethiopian script is divided into the following ranges: U+1200 to U+1224 Consonant phonetic letters U+1225 to U+122F Currently unassigned U+1230 to U+123D Vowel phonetic letters (U+1239 is an intentional gap) U+123E to U+123F Currently unassigned U+1240 to U+1254 Numbers (U+1240 is an intentional gap) U+1255 to U+125B Punctuation U+125C to U+125F Currently unassigned Draft October 30, 1992; rev 93/01/08 ETHIOPIAN CHARACTER NAMES LIST @ Consonant phonetic letters 1200 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT H 1201 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT L 1202 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT HH 1203 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT M 1204 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT SZ 1205 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT R 1206 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT S 1207 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT SH 1208 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT Q 1209 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT QH 120A ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT B 120B ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT V 120C ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT T 120D ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT C 120E ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT X 120F ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT N 1210 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT NY 1211 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT GLOTTAL 1212 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT K 1213 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT XX 1214 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT W 1215 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT NULL 1216 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT Z 1217 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT ZH 1218 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT Y 1219 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT D 121A ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT DD Oromo 121B ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT J 121C ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT G 121D ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT GG Bilen 121E ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT TH 121F ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT CH 1220 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT PH 1221 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT TS 1222 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT TZ 1223 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT F 1224 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT P 1225 1226 1227 1228 1229 122A 122B 122C 122D 122E 122F @ Vowel phonetic letters 1230 ETHIOPIAN VOWEL AE 1231 ETHIOPIAN VOWEL U 1232 ETHIOPIAN VOWEL I 1233 ETHIOPIAN VOWEL A 1234 ETHIOPIAN VOWEL E 1235 ETHIOPIAN VOWEL SCHWA 1236 ETHIOPIAN VOWEL O 1237 ETHIOPIAN VOWEL PHONETIC AE used primarily with U+1211 ETHIOPIAN CONSONANT GLOTTAL 1238 ETHIOPIAN VOWEL WAE 1239 123A ETHIOPIAN VOWEL WI 123B ETHIOPIAN VOWEL WA 123C ETHIOPIAN VOWEL WE 123D ETHIOPIAN VOWEL W 123E 123F @ Numbers 1240 1241 ETHIOPIAN NUMBER ONE 1242 ETHIOPIAN NUMBER TWO 1243 ETHIOPIAN NUMBER THREE 1244 ETHIOPIAN NUMBER FOUR 1245 ETHIOPIAN NUMBER FIVE 1246 ETHIOPIAN NUMBER SIX 1247 ETHIOPIAN NUMBER SEVEN 1248 ETHIOPIAN NUMBER EIGHT 1249 ETHIOPIAN NUMBER NINE 124A ETHIOPIAN NUMBER TEN 124B ETHIOPIAN NUMBER TWENTY 124C ETHIOPIAN NUMBER THIRTY 124D ETHIOPIAN NUMBER FORTY 124E ETHIOPIAN NUMBER FIFTY 124F ETHIOPIAN NUMBER SIXTY 1250 ETHIOPIAN NUMBER SEVENTY 1251 ETHIOPIAN NUMBER EIGHTY 1252 ETHIOPIAN NUMBER NINETY 1253 ETHIOPIAN NUMBER HUNDRED 1254 ETHIOPIAN NUMBER TEN THOUSAND @ Punctuation 1255 ETHIOPIAN WORDSPACE 1256 ETHIOPIAN COMMA modern usage like colon 1257 ETHIOPIAN COLON modern usage like semicolon 1258 ETHIOPIAN PERIOD 1259 ETHIOPIAN NEW COMMA modern usage 125A ETHIOPIAN QUESTION MARK archaic 125B ETHIOPIAN PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR archaic