Ethiopic syllable Kxee

It is one syllable sign in Ethiopic writing.

The Ethiopic script grew from a South Arabian consonant alphabet. That alphabet reached Tigray in the eighth century BCE. The earliest known Ethiopian-alphabet inscription comes from Dakhanamo. Around the fourth century CE, vowel notation reshaped the older consonant script into a syllabary, where each sign represents a consonant-and-vowel syllable.

The script first developed for writing Ge’ez and later adapted to languages including Amharic, Tigre and Oromo. In one Gurage orthography, ኼ sits in the e position of a palatalized-k row: the k is pronounced with the tongue raised toward the roof of the mouth. “Kxee” is the Unicode cell name, not a pronunciation shared by every language.