Amharic has been transcribed with Latin letters in a number of ways, all of them workable in various ways, but not very suitable for the modern word processor. In non-specialist publications it is quite common to use the alphabet of the language of the writer with approximate phonetic values (English, French, German, Italian, etc.), and for most people, this is all they need. However, scholars have devised two mainly phonetic alphabets that represent Amharic pronunciation more precisely. Most scholars seem to use vowel symbols that have more or less (but never fully equivalent) Continental values (one alternative including a), but usually with an extra symbol: the inverted e (d) or e with a wedge over it, and some use a » e and perhaps i with a line over them. Thus, the seven Amharic vowel orders may be written a, u , i , e, d , o, or a , u , i or i with a line over it, a with a line over it, e or e with a line over it, d or e or e with a wedge over it, o. Some use Greek epsilon (e) for the first order vowel, and/or e for the fifth order. The consonants have nearly (but of course never exactly) English values, but a wedge is used above s, c, c, n and z, and in one case also over g (for the sy/sh, ch, ch, n/ny , zy/zh and j sounds). Of these I have only 5 (and n with a tilde instead of a wedge) on my computer. Further, dots are generally placed under the glottal consonants (also called explosives or ejectives), except, commonly, q , which represents glottal k (i.e., k). Individual inventiveness may also come into the picture, such as dg for gn for n/ny, etc. One of these alphabets (including the first row of vowel signs above) seems to be preferred by most scholars, but a modification of it, devised by