Ethiopic

The Ethiopic script was originally developed to write the Ge'ez language spoken in ancient Ethiopia. Today Ge'ez is limited to liturgical use, but its writing system is also used to write several different modern languages spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea, including Amharic, Oromo, Tigre, and Tigrinya.[1]

[1] My sources for the section on Ethiopic are Getatchew Haile, “Ethiopic Writing,” in The World's Writing Systems, pp. 569–576, as well as the Unicode standard, pp. 284–286, and Nakanishi, pp. 102–103.

Ge'ez and Amharic are southern Semitic languages, cousins of Arabic and Hebrew. The writing system also has a Semitic origin, being more distantly related to the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets. It doesn't actually descend from the Phoenician ...

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