[Previous | Table of Contents] [Next | Recommendation]

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.''