Abstract
During the last two millennia, a large corpus of texts were produced in the Ethiopic script. This ancient African writing system is peculiar to the Ethio-Eritrean region at the Horn of Africa, particularly to the Ethiosemitic language Gǝʿǝz. The present paper is concerned with the origin, linguistic modification and spread of the Ethiopic script, as well as its socio-cultural connotation vis-à-vis other scripts in the region. For this purpose, previous studies related to these topics have been assessed and summarised in a comprehensive description.
Highlights
During the last two millennia, a large corpus of texts were produced in the Ethiopic script
Inspired by Indic scripts, it was modified to an alphasyllabary, while additional syllabographs, and graphemes for numerals were created as a result of the Greek influence
When the Ethiopic script was adapted for writing languages other than Gǝǝz and Amharic in the 19th and 20th centuries, new syllabographs were created by modifying existing graphemes, and various conventions were developed to indicate vowel length and gemination
Summary
𐩼 ⟨ẓ⟩ SA29 table 1: Ethiopic and South Arabian abjad scripts. Soon after its first attestations as abjad, the Ethiopic script was modified to an alphasyllabary in the 4th century ad (Weninger 2011b:1126; Frantsouzoff 2010:583; Avanzini 2007a:153). According to Salomon (2000:93), the merger of C+ǝ sequences and vowelless consonants into a single grapheme avoids the complications of indicating consonant clusters and vowel deletion found in Indic scripts, as native speakers intuitively know when ǝ is pronounced or suppressed. This principle seems to apply for gemination. [10] In a few cases, word-initial consonant clusters in Gǝǝz are dissolved by the prothetic vowel ǝ, which is represented in writing by እ⟨ʔ(ǝ)⟩, as in እግዚእ⟨ʔ(ǝ) g(ǝ) zi ʔ(ǝ)⟩ pronounced as [ǝg.ziʔ] ‘lord’ for underlying /gziʔ/ (cf Gragg 1997:178). The grapheme series based on the syllabograph አ⟨ʔä⟩~[ʔa] is used to represent word-initial vowels in loanwords from Greek or Latin (cf. Weninger 2005:469–471, 481)
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