Ethiopic Syllable Pwi

It writes the syllable transcribed as pwi in older Gurage spelling.

The older Gurage pwi series includes pwa, pwi, pwee, and pwe; these are separate syllables, not variants of one glyph.

Work on a collection of Gurage texts began in 1962; Chaha stories, from one Gurage language, appeared in Ethiopic print in 1966. The added syllables were adapted from existing Ethiopic letter families to mark Gurage sounds the earlier inventory did not distinguish.

What if someone sends ᎍ by itself?

Ask which text or language it came from.

ᎍ is a syllable sign used within Gurage words. By itself, it gives too little context to read a word or know what the sender intended.

Why does modern Gurage use another pwi character?

The revised spelling uses a separate character for the same syllable.

The revised Gurage spelling gives pwi a distinct Unicode character, 𞟽. The romanized label remains pwi, but the two characters belong to different spelling inventories.

The p-family forms appeared in missionary Gospel publications in 1977. A computer-font revision refined the orthography in 1998 and fed into Ethiopia’s ES781 spelling standard in 2002. Some Ethiopic fonts apply language-specific forms, so the same character can look different across fonts; a box means the selected font or app cannot draw it.