Ethiopic Syllable Thoa

It is an Ethiopic syllable in the Me’en set. Unicode groups ⶏ with the Me’en syllables, for a language spoken in Ethiopia. “Thoa” is its character name, not a word with its own dictionary meaning. In the 2004 proposal, “OA” hinted at an open-o sound between “o” and “a”; this naming clue does not fix the syllable’s pronunciation in Me’en.

Ethiopic writing grew from South Arabian alphabetic forms that wrote consonants without vowel signs. In the 3rd–4th centuries it developed into a syllabary, where each sign represents a consonant-and-vowel unit, for writing Ge’ez, a historical language of Ethiopia. The script later gained extra signs for languages not covered by the basic set. The wider extension’s proposal trail spans 1998 and 2004, based on Ethiopia’s ES 781:2002 standard.

Why does ⶏ appear as a box?

The font may not include this Ethiopic character. If ⶏ appears as a box, the browser’s font fallback may lack it. Its rendering depends on the browser’s font fallback and the installed Ethiopic fonts.