Fidel

``Ethiopic'' is the term most familiar to the western world for the primary writing system of Eritrea and Ethiopia. Other terms that have been used for the script in the west have been ``Abyssinian'', ``Ethiopian'' and ``Abyssinic''. In Eritrea and Ethiopia the writing system is known affectionately as ``Ge'ez'', ``Fidel'', and ``Fidelat'' and the foreign names may never be heard in ones lifetime. The terms may be used interchangably here to refer to the extended writing system. This includes all additional characters added to classic Ge'ez for tgrNa, amarNa, guragiNa and other languages, numbers, punctuation, and musical notes.

New page under development.

Info on Fidel

Ge'ez Web (HTML Without GIFs & JPEGs)

Graphic Ge'ez Web

Software

Coding & Encoding

Admas Modulo Class Ordering was originally developed for PCs where address space was limited and computations had to be done at the logical level of macros. The ordering of Fidel is contiguous and letters are grouped together by their number of forms. Thus a character's address readily identifies the number of syllabic forms it has (7, 8, or 12) -the character identity (he, le, ye) need not be none. The mathematical coding of Fidel simplies transliteration into secondary writing systems. The ordering is used internally by Mule and Admas products for SERA transliteration and was successfully applied in Goha WordPerfect macros as well. The greatest utility of modulo class mapping of Fidel is for internal use by applications.

A descriptive paper for the coding system is now available

Haddis was developed at EthiO Systems, it is described as ``The minimum required characters for adequate use as Ato Haddis Alemayehu's book Fiker Eske Mekabir.'' The Haddis prioritized Fidel is encoded in the limited Extened ASCII range of 32 - 255. Most ASCII punctuations are available but Latin letters are not. Haddis is one very good solution for the classic problem of working with Ethiopic's large character set in single byte code spaces.

A paper on the principal of limited Fidel sets and prioritized encoding is now available.

JIS is the acronym for Japanese Industrial Standard. Encoding of Fidel has been applied in the private use region beginning at Kuten [91,1] and follows a proposed Unicode ordering. Most Unix operating systems, IBM's OS/2, and special versions of MS Windows and DOS do use JIS (and a variant called Shift-JIS). JIS provides a means to import Fidel into multibyte operating systems and applications while Unicode replacements are being developed.

JUNET is the anacronym for Japanese Unix Network used for Email and Newgroup exchanges in Japan. MULE is a valuable JUNET interprettor. Fidel is encoded in the 4-byte range following Admas modulo class ordering. The only known use of the Ethiopic JUNET range is in Mule's display buffer. Since Mule converts bilingual SERA (for languages using Roman and Fidel scripts) natively, JUNET encoding is not generally required for Fidel documents.

SERA is the acronym for (The) System for Ethiopic Representation in ASCII. SERA does NOT assign code points (addresses) to Fidel characters. SERA is strictly a transliteration encoding system for 7-bit information interchange of Fidel. However, SERA may be applied in a hypothetical 3-byte encoding system (not recommended). Or in a variable width encoding system using both 1 and 2 byte characters. SERA files will always consume less memory space than 2-byte systems. The primary merits of SERA are:-

1) All of Fidel is mapped onto the ASCII set.
2) Human Readable.
3) Requires no special operating system or transfer protocals.

These are merits of SERA as an encoding system for transliteration and should not compared to, or confused with, coding systems that deal with ordering and assigning Fidel code space. SERA Web may be read in Latin without complication, or ideally with Mule and the W3 browser which will automatically convert SERA text into Fidel between <sera> and </sera> markups.

Additional On-Web info concerning SERA :-

Unicode and ISO-10646 are compatible 2 and 4-byte character coding systems for the world's writing systems. Plan-9, AIX, and Linux are operating systems already using Unicode. The Unicode standard is in release 1.0 and inclusion of Fidel is expected in a release after standard 2.0. A time frame for the Unicode standard with Fidel is unknown. Most software implementation issues for Fidel (L18N, IM & I/O) may be resolved with the proposed coding standards while waiting for Unicode and ISO's final resolution.

More Info is at The Unicode Resource Page

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