April-May - Volume 1, Issue 3

Ethiopic Character Set Progresses to Completion

According to Dr. Dawit Bekele, Chairperson of the National Task Force, the Technical Character Set Subcommittee of the Character Set National Standard is almost wounding up its tasks after duly scrutinizing the public comments forwarded to it on its web site and other available media.

This was disclosed at the joint meeting held at the conference hall of the Ethiopian Quality and Standards Authority (EQSA) on April 18, 2002. Dr. Dawit recalled that a National Technical Task Force Subcommittee consisting of three linguists and himself was formed in March 2001 and had been entrusted to submit the first draft of the study to government institutions, business organizations and associations to obtain comments to be used as inputs for the study. It has, thus, been able to meet in June 2001 to discuss the public comments for inclusion in the second draft. He said that the third draft of the study was posted in its web site to gather additional comments on broader basis.

The Subcommittee has been able to benefit from the quality of the comments forwarded to it from all the professions and thanked all the collaborators for their positive contributions based at home and abroad. He emphasized that the proposal for the study was based on the following standards.
o Ethiopic Alphabet
o Ethiopic Key Board
o Ethiopic Encoding and
o Ethiopic Transliteration

He said that the problems associated with computerization and networking in Ethiopic would be reduced as soon as the standards weere implemented. Dr. Dawit further informed the meeting that gathering of alphabets of different languages, including Geez and bringing them into the mainstream had been the important aims of the Ethiopic National Standard Set. The Technical Task Force had encountered problems at the outset, such as absence of a central institute for reference, inability to trace the details of additional alphabets included by different nationalities in their textbooks and probable use of some of them in literature and lack of understanding by linguists and individuals in the computer profession.

Dr. Dawit stated that the Task Force had initially designed a strategy that would ease the burden of the study and it focused on alphabets that were in broad use in the respective communities in Ethiopia.

The Task Force has now finalized the new arrangement on logical basis for the National Character Set incorporating all alphabets belonging to different languages.

Dr. Dawit affirmed that they have been able to accomplish their assigned tasks according to the strategy even though the complex nature of the task had taken them beyond the deadline. He also said that the omissions and commissions in the present Character Set would be rectified if the Academy of Ethiopian Languages or any other institution were mandated to decide on the selection and representation of alphabets that are in use in the country.