Help:IPA/Amharic

This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Amharic on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Amharic in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them. Integrity must be maintained between the key and the transcriptions that link here; do not change any symbol or value without establishing consensus on the talk page first. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

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The charts below show how the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents Amharic pronunciations in Wikipedia articles.

The Amharic letters (ፊደላት) in the second chart have the consonants in rows and the vowels in columns. Each letter represents one consonant (or consonant cluster) and one vowel. There are seven written vowels in Amharic with each vowel altering the form of a consonant. All of the consonant-vowel combinations in the first column are called first orders, the ones in the second column are second orders, and so on. The first order is identical to the letters used in the original Geʽez before the vocalizations were created centuries ago. The other six orders are alterations of the original Geʽez letters. Each vowel order similarly alters the Geʽez letters. Though there are many irregularities, the letters of the same order resemble one another in at least one aspect, the aspect that characterized the order.

Although the Amharic script can form simple syllables with one letter, it may take multiple letters to form one complex syllable. The complex syllables are formed using the sixth order, which serves the purposes of being a vowel carrier and of marking a mute consonant (without a vowel). For example, the Amharic word for "name", ስም, is one syllable but uses two letters. Although it is pronounced as /sɨm/ it could also be read as /ˈsɨmɨ/. There is no way to distinguish the sixth order's functions in written Amharic.

In the charts below, there are certain rows written in grey to indicate that such letters are of the same phonetic value as the previous row written in black. There are multiple ways to write some letters in Amharic as some of the sounds that were once used in Geʽez are non-existent in modern Amharic. At the cost of redundancy, Amharic speakers retain the archaic letters in their orthography to preserve the Geʽez origins of many of their words. Also, the English approximations are sometimes very rough, and they give only a general idea of the pronunciation.

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