> I think Wolf Leslau told me -- but I may have read it in

Hartmann's(?)

> grammar -- that there is not absolutely fixed repertoire of Amharic
> characters: that it's possible to invent letters for combinations as
> they are needed. An example is the <riya> that's included in my

chapter

> in Hetzron's *Semitic Languages*.
>

In the world of the pen this was once true, Amharic (still young as a
spoken and written language) has certainly stabalized in the last half
century as mechanical printing and centralized education have taken
over.

<riya> as I understand it phonetically, did make it into unicode,
though it probably should not have. The <riya>, <miya>, <fiya>
mystery was one that bothered me quite a bit and I chased their
shadows until finally settling on the belief that they are ligatures
for <ri><ya>, <mi><ya>, etc. A short hand much like the labialized
forms once were. These clusters occur at moderate frequency in
Amharic in the noun of instrument form of words (which derive from
noun of agent forms, the same sans the -ya). Its an odd coincidence
that nouns with the potential to conjugate in this way have a higher
probablity than other nouns to end with r, m, f. They are relics,
used now primarly for printing unicode tables ;-)

The minority languages just starting a written tradition is where
Ethiopic is most volatile and the rules of the pen still apply.

Fixing the repetoire I often feel is analgous to trying to fix the
shape of a cloud. The best we can do is work with a snapshot at a
particular point in time. The QSAE effort tries to pull together
present day snapshots from a number of different angles.