Abstract:
The Ethiopic fidäl is the most commonly used script for writing systems of the majority
languages spoken in Ethiopia. Among the twenty-two basic Ethiopic scripts, nine sounds
which have different shapes, forenames, and identical pronunciations represent more than
one graphic symbol. However, these scripts are appeared differently in many texts and
scholars have also written those scripts in arbitrary way even within a given single word.
This brings meaning change and sometimes some words remains senseless in some
context. As a result, this issue becomes a topic for debating and remains unclear.
Inconsistencies in the use of similar sound scripts become a common problem among the
scholars. Therefore, to fill this knowledge gap and to minimize the inconsistency, this
study aims at developing a writing system application to standardize the Ethiopic similar
sound scripts. To achieve this stated objective, data was collected from one Amharic
dictionary and four selected Ethiopic dictionaries. The collected data was triangulated
each other to measure their level of similarity and differences. Also, the result of the self
triangulated data taken from dictionaries was again triangulated with five hymns of St.
Yared and Psalms published in 1952 E.C. Finally, the validity and reliability of the
majority connivance was cross checked by the selected key informants. Then, the writing
system application has designed and developed using C-Sharp (C#) programming
language and the knowledge base (KB) was structured using Visual Studio integrated
development environment (IDE). The study reveals that the developed software replaces
the wrong typed script with the correct one by itself in a given word. Also, when a word
has double meaning, the software gives an alternative at the right side of the editor for the
user to choose the correct one using his or her linguistic competence. The findings
suggest that further investigations are needed in order to alleviate the problem and to
keep consistency in wider range among the Ethiopic scholars by including the
conjugation of all verbs and by including other features of the developed software.