WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Ethiopic
2 languages here are written in Ethiopic, and there is no layout map here yet. Both are typed on the Ethiopic layout, and Amharic has the widest bank to practise from at 45 words.
An abugida — and the one the word is named after, from the Ge'ez letters a-bu-gi-da. Unlike the Indic abugidas, the vowel is shown by altering the consonant's own shape rather than by hanging a mark off it, which is why the script is often called a syllabary and why it has so many characters: 33 base consonants in seven vowel orders is 231 before the labialised series is counted. You type a consonant then a vowel and the input method combines them, which makes typing Ethiopic closer to the CJK input methods than to an alphabet, despite being straightforwardly left to right.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Distinct characters
- 78 distinct characters across 65 practice words
- Ethiopic keyboard layout
- Ethiopic
- Keyboard guide
- shows the physical keys, and says so — no layout map yet
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in both languages below, most frequent first. These are the keys worth finding without looking.
- ት14
- ን10
- እ10
- ል7
- መ7
- አ7
- ም6
- ዓ5
- ይ5
- ገ5
The longest practice word in this script is አይደለም in Amharic, and the widest bank to practise from is Amharic at 45 words.
The 2 languages written in Ethiopic
Other writing systems
- Han Logographic: each character represents a word or a meaningful part of one, and there are tens of thousands.
- Armenian Created around 405 AD and unrelated to any neighbouring script, with 39 letters written left to right.
- Georgian Around 1,600 years old, unrelated to anything else, and — unusually — it has no capital letters at all.
There is a written guide for this script: Typing Amharic and Tigrinya: a syllable at a time. Ethiopic has a character for every consonant-and-vowel pair — far more than a keyboard has keys. How it is typed, and why no chart can show it.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.