The Geʾez Frontier Foundation Keyboard for the Ethiopic Orthographies of Eritrean and Ethiopian Languages

Introduction

This is an Ethiopic (Modern Geʾez) languages mnemonic input method. It requires a font supporting Ethiopic script under the Unicode 14 standard. The keyboard uses a phono-grapho “mnemonic” approach and is designed for the US English QWERTY keyboard. This means that the keyboard is designed to be intuitive and natural with respect to the sounds available in the English language via the standard English keyboard (known as QWERTY). The keyboard also supports some mnemonic mappings from non-English letters found on European keyboards.

A more complete typing manual is provided as a PDF file with this distribution.

Typing Letters

The keyboard provides mappings to allow all Ethiopic letters, punctuation, numerals, and special marks defined in the Unicode standard to be typed with relative ease. In total, some 523 symbols. No single language requires every available letter, thus this keyboard is not optimal for any particular language. Using a language-specific keyboard will be a better option if you do not have a multilingual typing need. Using a language-spefic keyboard will avoid the possibility of accidentally typing Basketto letters, for example, if your document language is only Amharic.

Special Notes:

• The keyboard prioritizes typing the letters in active use by some language, aka “Modern Geʾez” over the letters believed to be no longer in use by any language, aka “Legacy Geʾez”. The Modern Geʾez letters will accordingly be a little easier to type.
• Apostrophe, ' , is a terminator following a ሳድስ (6th form) letter. For example: mel'ak becomes መልኣክ , melak becomes መላክ .

Modern Geʾez

Legacy Geʾez