Psa, the Last Letter, and a Question About Where It Came From

Psa writes a plain p and closes the Ge'ez order at twenty-six. Like payt before it, it answers to no Semitic consonant: the inherited p had become f, and the two p letters exist because the language later needed to write a sound it had lost.

The usual explanation for this letter is that it is the Greek pi, taken over along with the Greek vocabulary and names that made it necessary. The explanation is plausible and it is not documented. It rests on a resemblance between two letterforms and on the plain fact that the words needing a p were Greek. A rival account keeps the letter inside the script, making it a modification of an existing fidel sign in the same way payt is usually said to be a modification of tayt. Nothing in the Aksumite record decides between them.

The atlas records the relation to the Greek pi as debated rather than attested, and carries an open question stating what would settle it: dated Aksumite inscriptions showing the earliest forms of both p letters, read against the South Arabian signary, by someone working in Ethiopian epigraphy. That is a real research programme rather than a rhetorical gesture, and the material for it is in the ground and in the museums of Tigray and Eritrea.