Amharic Keyboard

How this Amharic keyboard works

This keyboard is phonetic: you spell an Amharic word with Latin letters the way it sounds, and each keystroke is converted into Ge’ez script (ፊደል) as you type. A consonant on its own produces the vowel-less sixth form — press s and you get ስ. Following it with a vowel reshapes that letter: se becomes ሰ, su ሱ, si ሲ, sa ሳ, so ሶ. The fifth form is reached with the ie digraph familiar from the Ge’ez input method on macOS — sie gives ሴ. Hold Shift for the letters that have no single Latin equivalent, such as the ejective consonants: t types ተ while T types ጠ, and likewise C → ጨ, S → ጸ, P → ጰ, H → ሐ, N → ኘ.

The Ge’ez script: an abugida, not an alphabet

Amharic (አማርኛ) is a Semitic language of Ethiopia and the working language of its federal government. It is written in the Ge’ez script — also called Ethiopic — one of the oldest writing systems still in daily use. The script is an abugida: rather than separate letters for consonants and vowels, each symbol is a consonant–vowel syllable. Every base letter comes in seven orders, one for each vowel — ገ ጉ ጊ ጋ ጌ ግ ጎ — which is why the script has a few hundred distinct symbols built from only a few dozen base letters, and why a phonetic keyboard is so much more practical than hunting through character tables.

The script originally recorded Ge’ez, the classical language of the Aksumite kingdom, which acquired its vowel marking in the 4th century CE and survives today as the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Unlike its Semitic relatives Arabic and Hebrew, Ethiopic is written left to right. In Unicode it occupies its own Ethiopic block, so text you compose here works anywhere modern text does.

Numerals and punctuation

Ge’ez has its own numerals, adapted centuries ago from Greek alphabetic numerals: ፩ through ፱ for one to nine, ፲ through ፺ for the tens, ፻ for one hundred and ፼ for ten thousand. Notably, the system has no zero — numbers are composed additively, so 2018 is written ፳፻፲፰ (20×100 + 18). Everyday Ethiopian writing mostly uses Western digits, so this keyboard keeps your number keys Latin and offers the Ge’ez numerals as on-screen keys.

Ethiopic punctuation is alive and well: the four-dot ። ends a sentence, ፣ is the comma, ፤ the semicolon and ፥ the colon — this keyboard maps them to . , ; :. Historically words were separated by the two-dot ፡ divider; modern writing uses spaces. Question and exclamation marks are simply the Latin ? and !.

A few words to start with