Ge'ez (ግዕዝ) or Ethiopic script

This writing system is used in Ethiopia and Eritrea for several languages, notably Amharic and Tigrinya. It is actually a syllabary or "abuguida," meaning that characters represent a consonant and a vowel. It is also known in Amharic and Tigrinya as ፊደል ("fidäl"; sometimes written in English as "fidel").

A BBC article entitled "Ancient alphabet enters cyber age" (2000-1-19) describes the early process of adapting this script to computers (before Unicode). See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/609217.stm

There is an effort to collect information on the history of and contributors to computing in Ethiopic/Ge'ez at http://abyssiniagateway.net/fidel/legends/

Fonts

A good font for this script Abyssinica SIL.

Keyboards & input methods

The "Basic Ethiopic character picker" at http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/pickers/ethiopic/ lets one compose text in this script by clicking on the characters.

Other character pickers are available on the Lexilogos keyboard site:

• "amharique አማርኛ" - http://www.lexilogos.com/clavier/geez.htm
• "tigrigna ትግርኛ" - http://www.lexilogos.com/clavier/geez_tigrinya.htm

Resources

"Ethiopic Computing Information" (TLT, Penn State Univ.) http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/ethiopic.html

(see also References, below)

ISO-15924

Code	N°	English Name	Nom français	Property Value Alias	Date
Ethi	430	Ethiopic (Ge‘ez)	éthiopien (ge‘ez, guèze)	Ethiopic	2004-10-25

Source: Codes for the representation of names of scripts / Codes pour la représentation des noms d’écritures, http://www.unicode.org/iso15924/iso15924-codes.html

References

Wikipedia, "Abuguida," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida

______, "Ge'ez alphabet," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge%27ez_abugida

______, "Ge'ez language," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge%27ez_language (deals with both the script and the language)

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