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Mela is a free online Amharic keyboard that lets you type the Ethiopic script (ፊደል / Fidel) directly in your browser. Click the letters above to write in Amharic, Tigrinya, Ge'ez and other languages that share the Ethiopic script. The keyboard also includes Amharic punctuation (ሥርዓተ ነጥብ) and Ge'ez numerals (ቁጥሮች), so you can compose complete documents, social posts and messages.
When you're done, copy your text with one click and paste it anywhere. Need to share with non-Amharic readers? Hit the Translate button to open Google Translate with your text already filled in.
The Ethiopic script, called ፊደል (Fidel) in Amharic, is one of the oldest writing systems still in active use anywhere in Africa, and one of only a handful of indigenous African scripts. The earliest Semitic inscriptions associated with it, found in what is today Eritrea, date to around the 9th century BCE. The script grew out of the Ancient South Arabian script, and scholars still debate whether it took its distinctive form on the African side of the Red Sea, in what is now Eritrea or northern Ethiopia, or in Yemen. Whichever side of that debate one favors, the Ge'ez script as we use it today matured on African soil. Its oldest known inscription in this Ethiopian form, the Hawulti obelisk, still stands in Matara, Eritrea.
During the first centuries CE, an "Old Ethiopic" stage emerged that wrote Ge'ez (ግዕዝ) as an abjad of 26 consonant letters, written from right to left, with no vowels marked. The pivotal change came in the 4th century CE, during the reign of King Ezana of Aksum, when the script was vocalized: small marks attached to each consonant began to indicate one of seven vowels, turning the alphabet into the abugida (alphasyllabary) it remains today. The first completely vocalized inscriptions are royal inscriptions of Ezana himself, though vocalized letters appeared a few years before him.
An abugida sits between an alphabet and a syllabary: each Fidel character represents a consonant fused with a specific vowel. The script is organized into seven orders, called ግዕዝ, ካዕብ, ሣልስ, ራብዕ, ኃምስ, ሳድስ and ሳብዕ, one for each vowel, so a single base consonant such as ሀ produces seven syllabograms (ሀ ሁ ሂ ሃ ሄ ህ ሆ). With roughly 33 base consonants in common Amharic use, plus labiovelar forms and additional characters for particular languages, the full Fidel comes to more than 230 commonly used letters. The script also has its own punctuation, including the word separator ፡ (hulet neteb) and the sentence ending ። (arat neteb), as well as its own numerals (፩ ፪ ፫ … ፲ ፻ ፼), which follow an additive base ten system distinct from Arabic numerals.
Today the Ge'ez script writes a range of Afroasiatic and Nilo Saharan languages spoken across the Horn of Africa, including Amharic (አማርኛ), Tigrinya (ትግርኛ), Tigre, Bilen and several Gurage languages, along with others. Ge'ez itself, the classical language for which the script is named, is no longer anyone's first language but remains the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The full script is encoded in Unicode across four blocks: Ethiopic (U+1200 to U+137F), Ethiopic Supplement (U+1380 to U+139F), Ethiopic Extended (U+2D80 to U+2DDF) and Ethiopic Extended A (U+AB00 to U+AB2F). Anything you type with Mela is therefore standard, portable Unicode text that any device with an Ethiopic font can render correctly.