The Ethiopic Script: Linguistic Features and Socio-cultural Connotations

Abstract

During the last two millennia, a large corpus of texts were produced in the Ethiopic script. This ancient African writing system is peculiar to the Ethio-Eritrean region at the Horn of Africa, particularly to the Ethiosemitic language Gǝʿǝz. The present paper is concerned with the origin, linguistic modification and spread of the Ethiopic script, as well as its socio-cultural connotation vis-a-vis other scripts in the region. For this purpose, previous studies related to these topics have been assessed and summarised in a comprehensive description.