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Preface

This proposal may now be considered to be a completed work. Herein lie revisions given to reflect the design considerations that produced the ``Conclusive Proposal for Encoding of Ethiopic Syllabary'' (UTC-95-055A) offered to ISO at the April 1996 WG2 meeting in Copenhagen. The ``Conclusive Proposal...'' was lead by Dr. Joeseph Becker of XSoft/Xerox and composed after extended discussion over Internet with all groups offering proposals in 1995 for Ethiopic character coding. The authors of this original report support the decisions presented in UTC-95-055A. This work furthers UTC-95-055A by offering coding for extended Ethiopic characters left for future extensions of the 10646/Unicode standard. The authors believe these extensions and the revisions made to reflect UTC-95-055A in this completed work will offer developers a resource for the issues important to their work with the Ethiopic writing system.

Introduction

The Ethiopic script has its origin in Ge'ez, the official liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The Ge'ez script is a syllabic form of writing in which each glyph represents the fusion of a consonant and a vowel. It is comprised of 26 consonants, each of which have 7 vowel-fused forms and is most commonly represented as a 26x7 matrix. The Ethiopic script is a superset of the Ge'ez script. It contains many additions to handle various other languages spoken in the region but have no written tradition. The Ethiopic script also contains numerical and punctuation enhancements necessary in modern writing. Please refer to https://abyssiniagateway.net/fidel/HISTORY.txt for a more comprehensive history of the evolution of the Ethiopic script.

A Name For The Character Set

Several alternative names, ``Fidel,'' ``Ethiopian,'' ``Ge'ez,'' and ``Ethiopic,'' had been proposed for the character set:

``Fidel'' is the word by which the syallabary is most commonly known among Ethiopians. However, ``fidel'' also translates simply as ``alphabet'' or ``a writing system'' and could not serve as a name for this particular syllabary even though it is often associated with it. For example, while ``fidel'' would be most commonly understood among Ethiopians as the name for their writing system, it could also be used by Ethiopians to refer to other writing systems such as the ``Latin fidel,'' the ``Greek fidel,'' etc. Therefore, it could not serve adequately as a name for the character set.

The adjective ``Ethiopian'' has world-wide racial, cultural, and historical associations beyond its reference to the currently shifting political and national boundaries that define the country of Ethiopia which make it an attractive choice for naming the syllabary; however, since the emergence of Eritrea as another country in which the syllabary is in use, it seemed inappropriate to refer to the character set by the word used to refer to one of the countries in which it is used.

``Ge'ez'' refers to the language in which the original Sabean alphabet first took root and began its metamorphosis into a syllabary . Ge'ez is also the liturgical language still in use in the Ethioipian Orthodox church. The argument for using it as a name of the character set was based not only on the strength of its reference to the origin of the syllabary, (some saw in its usage a parallel to the relationship between "Latin" and the various languages that use the Latin alphabet today ), but also on the solution it provided to the problem of multi-national use of the syllabary (since the emergence of Eritrea as another country in which the syllabary is used) mentioned above.

``Ethiopic'' as a name for the syllabary has several advantages. Although it contains a reference to Ethiopia, it is not a direct reference to the political or national entity. ``Ethiopic'' is also a word that has been used interchangeably with ``Ge'ez'' in Western literature on Ethiopia. In the final analysis, the Unicode Consortium asserts that the adjective ``Ethiopic'' carries with it greater name recognition vs the other possible alternatives. As Unicode and the ISO will refer to the syllabary as ``Ethiopic'' in their publications, we will do so here for consistency and to avoid confusion for would be developers.