Ethiopic standards

Below I will give attention to two variants, both have never been official standards, but both are widely used: The problem with the Ethiopic script is that it is syllabic, like the Indian scripts, from which it probably derives this form, but unlike the Indian scripts were vowels are marked as ornaments to the base characters, in the Ethiopic script they are marked by variation of the base character. So to be glyph based there is a need for a large number of code points. In the original Unicode proposal the situation was still (as Unicode propagates) that the different glyphs were encoded as a consonant code followed by a vowel code, this was not followed in the finally accepted Unicode version (as of Unicode 3.0). The glyph based coding can be found in the Haddis coding below, the combining coding in the SERA coding, also below.

Haddis

This code was made popular by EthiO Systems, and is in widespread used on computers with the Windows system. It uses two code pages, depicted below.


This first page has the most frequently symbols used.


This second page shows quite a few not so frequently used symbols. Note that two symbols are duplicated on the first code page. How switching between code pages is done I do not know. Note that this code does not encode the full Unicode 3.0 complement, about 30 glyphs are missing.

SERA

SERA (System for Ethiopic Representation in ASCII) is widely used to represent the Ethiopic script in ASCII. Also it serves as a transliteration between Ethiopic syllables and ASCII. The base Ethiopic script consists of syllables, each representing a consonant followed by a vowel. For each consonant there are 7, 8 or 12 variants. In all cases the consonant can be followed by 6 different vowels, and the vowel can be suppressed. When there are 12 variants the additional 5 represent the cases where the consonant is modified to a labio-velar consonant, followed by 1 of 4 vowel, or no vowel at all. In the 8 variant version, the labio-velar consonant can only be followed by the vowel a. There are three exceptional cases where the consonant is palatized and can only be followed by the vowel a. SERA is based on this, an Ethiopic syllable is represented (in ASCII) by a consonant followed by a vowel. This is shown in the table below. The top row displays the vowels used, the left column the consonants used. The dash represents abcense of vowel. The letter W shows a labio-velar variant. The letter Y (in the left column) represents palatization. The order given here is not the canonical Ethiopic order, but the order according to Latin alphabetization. Because the number of possible consonants and vowels exceed those in the Latin scripts, variations are shown with lower- vs. upper-case and a possible backtick which also shows a variation. The symbols marked with a small green border are not in Unicode, but are proposed. Those with a small red border are possible further extensions, and those with a wide green border have suggested allocation in the Private Use section of Unicode. More information about SERA can be found at the SERA FAQ pages.


There are a few deviations of the codes shown in the table:
In all cases where `h is followed by W the backtick is omitted.
The absent vowel in the case where there is also no consonant is coded with I.
In Amharic the single vowel e can be coded as a, in that case the single vowel a must be coded as A.
The sequence Wa is coded as ea.
A consonant following a backtick can also be coded as the consononant followed by the digit 2, or as a doubled consonant.
There are additional variants for the possible coding, I will not give them here. Most notable is that the apostrophe serves as a separator, it can be used when confusion is possible.

Numerals

The Ethiopic number system differs from the Western number system, there are numerals for the digits 1 to 9, moreover there are symbols for the tens 10 to 90, 100 and 10000. The table below shows them. In SERA normally digits are displayed in the Western digits, when Ethiopic numbers are required the number should be preceded by a backtick. However, writing numbers for Ethiopic display requires some care. It is best to code the required symbols successively, that is 1987 becomes: `10`9`100`80`7. The backticks (except the first) can all be omitted, so we find `109100807. Shortcuts are possible, but can be confusing. Two times the symbol for 10000 is 10000 * 10000, or 100,000,000, three times the same multiplies again by 10000. (The same can be seen in the symbol itself, 10000 is nothing more than a ligature on two successive symbols for 100.) If there are not tens, the units are 1, and the following symbol would be 100 or 10000, the 1 can be omitted.

Punctuation

There are two classes of Ethiopic punctuation, those having a Unicode coding, and those that do not have them. Below the punctuation with Unicode coding is shown, together with the SERA code needed to get them.

Additional Punctuation

The symbols below have only suggested codings in the Private Use area in Unicode, moreover the first five have special escape sequences in SERA that may or may not be honoured.

Others

All ASCII symbols that are not indicated in some way above are simply displayed as is, except for those upper-case letters that have no definition. They are thought to be the same as the equivalent lower-case letters.