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Introduction
The Ethiopian 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 Ethiopian 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 Ethiopian 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 Ethiopian script.
A Name For The Character Set
The adjective ``Ethiopian'' has world-wide racial,
cultural, and historical connotations beyond its
reference to the currently shifting political and
national boundaries that define the country of
Ethiopia. In view of this fact, we refer to the
writing system that has had a significant amount of
indigenous multi-lingual development in this region of
the African continent in relation to the history of
the region as ``the Ethiopian syllabary.''