Ethiopic Hwa

It is the rounded hwa form in the Ethiopic ሐ row.

To pronounce ሗ, begin with a breathy h while rounding your lips, then open into a. Its common romanization is hwa; scholarly spellings include ḥʷa and ħwa. In Unicode’s “HHWA” label, doubled h distinguishes the name; it does not mean two h sounds.

How did Ethiopic writing develop?

It grew from consonant writing into a script that marks vowels.

The history of Ethiopic writing begins in the Horn, where South-Arabian consonant writing is attested in the 8th/7th centuries BCE. Ethiopic writing for Ge’ez appears in the 1st–3rd centuries CE; in the 4th century, it shifted from an abjad (a script that mainly writes consonants) to an abugida (a script where vowel changes modify consonant signs). As of 2026, the earliest identified Ethiopic inscription is at Dakhanamo.

The script was later adapted for Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, and other languages, while Ge’ez became chiefly a liturgical language used in worship. In Amharic, some historically separate h-letter rows are pronounced alike, but their spellings remain distinct, especially in names and religious texts.