Ethiopic Syllable Su

On a phonetic Ethiopic keyboard, type s then u. A common Amharic fidel layout maps that sequence to ሱ. Other layouts differ because Unicode does not prescribe keyboard mappings; some arrange consonants and vowel forms as pairs.

What does ሱ mean?

It marks a spoken syllable, not a word on its own. The word around it supplies the meaning.

Regional writing evidence includes inscriptions in a South Arabian-style script known as pseudo-Sabaean, dated to the 8th/7th centuries BCE. Recognisable Proto-Ge’ez evidence appears around the 4th–5th centuries BCE; the Ge’ez abjad—a consonant-based writing system adapted from South Arabian writing—appears in the 1st–3rd centuries CE. How these stages connect remains debated.

The script first served Ge’ez, a language of the region. In the 4th century CE, adding vowel marks turned its consonant-based writing into a syllabary, where each sign represents a consonant-vowel syllable; this helped speed Ge’ez text production, including sacred texts. It later served Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, Oromo, and other languages.