Ethiopic Extended

Ethiopic Extended is a Unicode block containing Ge'ez characters for the Me'en, Blin, and Sebatbeit languages.

The Ethiopic script is an abugida (consonant-syllable alphabet), primarily designed for writing the Old Ethiopic language called Ge'ez of the country Aksum. The languages using the Ethiopic script call it Fidäl (ፊደል), which is literally translated as a script or alphabet.

It was indeed adopted for writing other languages too. As a rule, ethiosemit. The most widespread one is Amharic in Ethiopia and Tigrinya in Eritrea and Ethiopia. It is also used for some of the Gurage languages, as well as Meken and many other languages of Ethiopia. In Eritrea, it is used for Tigre, and traditionally for the Kushite language called Bilin. Some other Horn of Africa languages, such as Oromo, previously also used the Ethiopian script, but switched to alphabets based on Latin.

In 1956 an Oromo poet Sheikh Bakri Sapalo creates a syllabus, the structure of which is close to Ethiopian. The basic symbols were designed later.

In this article you will find a special system for marking the sounds, which is quite popular among linguists, who explore Ethiopian languages. It's a bit different from the universal International Phonetic Alphabet.