Ethiopic syllable bu

It is the Ethiopic b-series syllable for “bu.” It contributes one syllable to a word; on its own, it does not name a complete thing. In Amharic, this kind of letter belongs to the fidel, an abugida: consonant letters change shape with the vowel they carry. A South Arabian script tradition reached the Horn around the eighth century BCE. A clearly recognizable Ethiopic script appears in inscriptions from the second or third centuries CE; by the fourth century CE, vowel marking had turned consonant signs into ordered syllable signs.

The mark on the middle right gives this form its u order. In the b-series, በ is the base form and ብ marks the sixth vowel order; neither is the u syllable. Changing the form changes the syllable.

How did Ethiopic writing evolve?

It served public, institutional, and literary communication. Aksumite inscriptions include royal statements, building dedications, religious claims, multilingual texts, and local coin legends. Ge’ez later became the liturgical language of Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox traditions, while the script continued in manuscripts and modern language writing.

Related to South Arabian writing, Ethiopic developed a distinct left-to-right tradition rather than preserving its ancestor unchanged. The script serves Ge’ez, Amharic, Tigrinya, and Tigre; shared letters can represent different sounds across those languages. The surrounding word, not this glyph alone, settles how to read ቡ.