There are 87 Ethiopian and 8 Eritrean languages in the collective regionswhere Ethiopic text is in use. Orthographic practices are numerous; oftenlanguage specific, influenced by neighboring, external, and even extinctlanguages. This document does not attempt to address specific orthographicpractices nor does it address localization with respect to input methods,national language support or other GUI issues but is intended to provideinformation on and example of general text formatting issues common tocomputer operating and word processing systems.
The task of describing formatting practices in Ethiopia is one on par withdescribing the shapes of clouds in Ethiopia. Like clouds Ethiopic formattingis rather hard to pin down for study and careful description. Before one couldfinish describing the shape it would invariably change before you.
Fortunately, and like clouds as well, formats come from all places and in awide range of shapes which people are willing to accept with little aversion todifference. But thereis commonality among these clouds over Ethiopia that we can consider. Thepoint here is to keep in mind that at this time there are no standardconventions for formatting text in Ethiopia but rather a plethora of defactostandards for modern practices coexisting with fairly well known rules fromtraditional practices.
Modern Ethiopic script is a syllabary written from left-to-right and has noupper and lowercase letters. The writing system contains contains syllabicletters, numerals, punctuation. Punctuation and numerals are also borrowedfrom foreign writing practices.
The Ethiopic wordspace character,
(U+1361),was a device originally used tominimize the space between words on a line while keeping the words discernible.In this way allowing scribes to maximize the use of available space on theirlabor intensively produced writing material, Brana. ``Hulet Neteb'' was still instrong use during the first half of the present century. The Addis Zemennewspaper stopped using the Hulet Neteb in 1942 which is a good referencepoint to mark the decline of the character. Hulet Neteb is oddly used more inhand written practices today than in modern typesetting, though it remainsvital to the later.
Rules of Hulet Neteb:
In Eritrean-Tigrigna the Hulet Neteb (or ``Kelete Netbi'') is used in placeof
(U+1363) in Ethiopian practicesand thus takes on a different syntactic meaning. The use as a list or numericseparator is not known to the present author.
This is really more of an IM issue; In Eritrean-Tigrigna,
(U+1367), is thepreferred question mark character. U+1367 is otherwise unknown inEthiopia where an Ethiopic-ized U+007F is a must.
In keeping with Ethiopic wordspace no additional space is inserted before orafter Ethiopic punctuation. In modern practices a single word space will beadded after the punctuation. It should also be noted that while an Ethiopicparagraph separator,
(U+1368), isidentified in the Unicode standard for Ethiopic, it is not used in modernpractices.
A characteristic trait of Ethiopic writing is that the weight of thetext is heavier than for most other scripts. The apparent ``extra weight'' should also be applied to borrowed text elements from otherscripts. This included western numerals and punctuation. Doing sogives the text and a natural and continuous visual flow. Not doing sobecomes visually confusing. It is the prevalent practice in professionalcomputer fonts to add this extra weight.
Additionally, and for the same esthetic benefit, the rules of curvaturemay be borrowed from Ethiopic elements and grafted onto the borrowed foreignsymbols. Recommended examples of this practice are demonstrated in theMonotype and SIL Premier Ethiopic fonts which enjoy widespread use ingovernment and private houses in Ethiopia.
Ethiopic follows similar rules to English where a word may be split overtwo lines at a syllable. Since all Ethiopic word elements are syllablesthe splitting point is considered arbitrary and no hyphenation characteris used.
The lack of a hyphenation character might sound alarming, many Ethiopianwords are in fact compound words so practices could easily lead to ambiguity.This indeed would be so and the practice likely never would have evolvedwere it not for use of the Ethiopic Wordspace (U+1361) to clearly markword boundaries. It is only recently since the decline of Ethiopic wordspacethat Ethiopic hyphenation has lead to uncertain interpretation of text.Readers knowing the context of a passage have little or no cognitive exercisein reforming a broken compound word. This area is primarily a concern totext and word processing tools.
Abbreviation rules vary only slightly from those in American-Englishpractices. For example Ethiopia's capital city, Addis Ababa, wouldbe abbreviated in American-English as ``A.A.'' while in Ethiopia ``
/'' wouldbe the most common form. Fullstop (U+002E) is commonly used in place offorward slash (U+002F) as in``.'' -take care to note that unlike American-English, when fullstopis used no fullstop is applied after the terminal character of theabbreviation.
Abbreviations are very common and fairly standard in office practices,a list of the most common can befound here.
Lists in Ethiopic text are separated by Ethiopic comma, (U+1363), followed by ASCII space. Ethiopic semicolon andcolon may also be found in use as a list separator. This is a common resortof typists when the Ethiopic comma is not available in an Ethiopic font. It is also indicative of the overlapping or interchangeable roles of thepunctuation as is often their perception.
Ordered list are given in Ethiopic text using the first form of an Ethiopicsyllable followed generally by a "/" or ".". In example:
/
/
/After the first cycle additional cycles are given by incrementing thoughthe syllabary
///and for the 3rd cycle:
///and so on.
Numbers are less often used in lists though they do play a more importantrole in numbering chapters and sections in books and for labeling versesin Ethiopian Bibles.
and variant
(U+1368),should be available to the composer as a bullet item as well.Ethiopic preface colon is most commonly found in interviews atthe end of the presenters name before the dialogue passage is given:
Preface colon may also be used to terminate an item in an orderedlist as per:
Otherwise the preface colon is found to take on many of the roles filledby the western colon.
Both Ethiopic and Western numerals are in use today. Though the Ethiopichas long since been retired to a reserved use primarily for calendar dates and demarcation of sections in literature. While Western numerals are usedeverywhere else following western practices.
As noted previously Ethiopic numerals may serve as their own word boundarieswhen Hulet Neteb is in use. Like Roman numerals their Ethiopic counterpartshave bars above and below that are commonly rendered as a continuous line ina numeric sequence.
Also noteworthy is that an Ethiopic ordinal system analogous to1st, 2nd, etc. is common where for either Ethiopicor western numerals the superscript
(U+129B) is used in Amharic and
(U+12ED) inTigrigna.
The Ethiopic numerals are a set of twenty characters. The first 9 arethe digits 1-9 and next 10 are the numbers 10-100 the last is the number10,000 though in recent decades it has fallen into misuse as 1,000.Onlinealgorithms offer an explanation for how the numbers increment.
Negative Ethiopic numerals are not used. The format for negative westernnumerals is simply-123.
There is no Ethiopic currency symbol for Ethiopia's monetary unit the Birr(
No more than two places are given after the decimal. Values of less thanone Birr may still be formatted as a whole value where the leading zero mayor may not be present before the decimal. As in the west the alternateformatting without the decimal is not uncommon where a superscripted
(U+1233) is used in lieu of a cents sign (i.e. ¢).
There are a mirade of possibilities for the formatting of dates and timein Ethiopia. The basis for date formatting comes from the Ethiopian Calendarwhich is a variant of the better known Julian calendar. In brief the epoch ofthe Ethiopian calendar is roughly 7 years and 8 months after that of theGregorian. The calendar has 13 months, there are 12 months of 30 days and a13th month of 5 days. There is a leap year every four years in which the 13thmonth will gain a 6th day. The current year is 1991 which is a leap year.ANSI C computer code for Ethiopian and Gregorian calendar conversions, withEthiopic formatting utilities, may be found herehere.
/) and AD (/
) in the Ethiopic calendar system. They are used much more often in date formats than in Western practices.
Applying the above we can demonstrate a few of the possible accepted examples of a formatted date:
 | A long format date using a 24-hour clock. |
 | The same but the date of the week is an Ethiopic digit. |
 | Our date now uses western numerals and. is replaced by/ as user preference has changed. |
 | Using a 12 hour clock the hour becomes ambiguous so the meridian field is used. |
 | The same hour under the Western reference system. This will likely be desirable to Ethiopians working outside of Ethiopia and with foreign agencies within Ethiopia. Though the clock is a 24 hour clock, ``AM'' is added in English to clarify the Western reference. |
 | The minimalist format under horizontal space limitations. Any of the fields now absent were always independently optional. |
Ugghhh... This is tedious. At least 4 basic matricies are in use,labiovelars may be added to the matricies in at least 3 differentways,then things get language specific.
Stick with the Unicode layout for now.
In text processing it is essential to be aware of the character classone is operating on. The table below shows the most basic divisions within the Ethiopic syllabary as defined in the Unicode standard.
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In linguistic processing it is a necessity to be able to detect and resetthe syllabic form of an Ethiopic syllable. Fortunately the modulo class (witha modulo division of 8) of the syllable's Unicode address readily revealssyllabic form of the character. It is also essential in both text andlinguistic processing to detect the number of siblings a syllable may have.The following table shows this with respect to Unicode address space.
Syllable Families:
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Classes have also be constructed from the linguistic values of thewritten syllables. In many Ethiopian languages a syllabic set will duplicate the phonemes of another set, or two forms within a set mayshare a phoneme. It is useful in linguistic processing and IM to be awareof this. Such occurrences are language sensitive and will be addressed inthis document in a future revision.
These paperson regular expressions for Ethiopic also addresses Ethiopic characterclasses.
