Gurage Pwee Syllable

It marks the whole spoken syllable pwe, not a bare p. Gurage uses this added form where a basic Ethiopic character cannot show that sound.

In 1962, writer Sahle Selassie Berhane Mariam and linguist Wolf Leslau devised extra Ethiopic letters for Chaha, a Gurage language, to spell sounds the older set lacked; their text appeared in print in 1966. Later spellings revised the extra letters. A new Gurage Fider, the local writing standard, took shape in 2013, gained Gurage Zone endorsement in 2019 and entered schools in September 2020. Unicode encoded this modern form in 2021.

The older equivalent is ᎎ, a different Unicode character. Modern Gurage Fider serves several Gurage varieties; the early work focused on Chaha.