Ge'ez

The Ge'ez script, called fidal, has one of the best documented transformations in the history of writing. Its ancestor is the South Arabian script, a consonant-only alphabet of the kingdoms of ancient Yemen, which crossed the Red Sea with settlers and traders into the highlands of Eritrea and Ethiopia. Early Aksumite inscriptions use unvocalised letters in the South Arabian manner. Then, in about the fourth century CE, the same era in which King Ezana of Aksum adopted Christianity, the script was systematically vocalised: each consonant sign was given seven regular modifications, one for each vowel order, turning an abjad into an abugida in which every written sign is a complete syllable.

The reform was thorough and apparently rapid, and it made the script capable of recording scripture unambiguously, which many historians connect to the translation of the Bible into Ge'ez that began in the Aksumite period. The resulting grid of letters, memorised in order as the fidal table, has remained essentially stable for over fifteen hundred years, and was later extended with new letters for Amharic, Tigrinya and other languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea that inherited it. The direction of writing also changed in the crossing, settling left to right, against the right-to-left habit of its Semitic relatives.

Ge'ez ceased to be anyone's mother tongue centuries ago, yet it remains the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and its script is therefore in constant sacred use. The Ethiopian biblical canon, the broadest in Christendom, is preserved in Ge'ez, including complete texts of Enoch and Jubilees that survive in no other language, a fact that gives the script a unique standing in biblical scholarship. Manuscript production in the fidal script is a living monastic craft: parchment gospels, psalters, antiphonaries for the chant tradition attributed to Saint Yared, and the small protective scrolls prepared by debtera clergy are still written by hand with reed pens, in black with red rubrication for sacred names.

Beta Israel, the Jewish community of Ethiopia, kept its own religious literature in Ge'ez as well, including its Orit, the Octateuch. The script also serves the modern languages Amharic and Tigrinya, so an Ethiopian reader moves between newspaper and psalter within one system of letters, an unbroken continuity between daily life and an ancient canon that few scripts anywhere can match. Church schools still teach children the fidal table by chant, much as the syllabary has been learned for centuries.