Ethiopic Syllable Poa

It marks the Me’en syllable “poa.”

Me’en uses Ethiopic writing, and ⶒ is one of the added syllable signs needed for its spelling. Read it within the word it appears in; the surrounding signs make up the rest of the word.

Why was the Ethiopic extension made?

To write languages the older set could not cover.

The wider Ethiopic script first served Ge’ez, a classical language of the Horn of Africa. One early layer of writing in Ethiopia and Eritrea is pseudo-Sabaean material—forms resembling the writing of ancient South Arabia—from the 8th/7th centuries BCE. Ethiopic consonant-only writing, called an abjad, appears in the 1st–3rd centuries CE. In the 4th century, it becomes an abugida, where a consonant sign also indicates its vowel.

The expansion that includes ⶒ followed Ethiopia’s ES 781:2002 standard and a 2004 Unicode proposal for languages the basic set did not cover. The proposal names Me’en among the languages needing added signs; its references cite Me’en primers, books, and a syllabary from 1999–2002. The wider script was adapted for Amharic and other languages, including Me’en.