Geʽez Braille is a collection of

braille Braille ( , ) is a Tactile alphabet, tactile writing system used by blindness, blind or visually impaired people. It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille displays that connect to computers and smartphone device ...

alphabets for the

Ethiopia Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...

n languages that are written in

Geʽez script Geʽez ( ; , ) is a script used as an abugida (alphasyllabary) for several Afroasiatic languages, Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages, Nilo-Saharan languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea. It originated as an abjad (consonantal alphabet) and was ...

in print. Letter values are mostly in line with international usage. At least

Amharic Amharic is an Ethio-Semitic language, which is a subgrouping within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. It is spoken as a first language by the Amhara people, and also serves as a lingua franca for all other metropolitan populati ...

is supported; perhaps the extended letters needed for Tigrinya, Tigre and possibly other Ethiopian languages are supported as well, but if so that is not recorded in available references.

Amharic alphabet

Amharic Braille may be an

abugida An abugida (; from Geʽez: , )sometimes also called alphasyllabary, neosyllabary, or pseudo-alphabetis a segmental Writing systems#Segmental writing system, writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit ...

like the print

, but the inherent vowel is epenthetic ''ə'' rather than ''a'' . The same letter is used for syllables ending in the vowel ''ə'' as for the bare consonant. Other syllables are written with this letter plus a second letter for the vowel. Thus the system is very close to a true

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

, with any inherent ''ə'' vowel often but evidently not always predictable. The photograph of the syllabic chart at right shows a blank cell being used for the inherent vowel ''ə''. That is perhaps an artefact of the presentation; UNESCO (2013) shows that is simply not written.Unesco (2013)
World Braille Usage
3rd ed. is not the default vowel in print Amharic, which is instead (braille ). For most consonants, ''a'' is the only vowel that can occur in a ''Cw-'' syllable, so ''-wa'' has its own letter: . ''CwV'' and ''CyV'' syllables other than ''-wa'' are written with medial ''w'' and ''y'': Note that ''-wə'' is written , as if it were ''-wu'', a combination that does not occur in print.

Tigrinya and Tigrean alphabets

Numbers

Ethiopic digits do not follow the international pattern. They are also

circumfix A circumfix ( abbr: ) (also parafix, confix, or ambifix) is an affix which has two parts, one placed at the start of a word, and the other at the end. Circumfixes contrast with prefixes, attached to the beginnings of words; suffixes, attached a ...

ed with ... : Western numbers are marked with as in other braille alphabets.

Punctuation

Native punctuation is as follows: The last is ''yizet'', one of several interlinear tone marks. There is also Western punctuation:

References

{{Braille French-ordered braille alphabets Amharic language